Semantic Approaches for the Use of Cultural Data

Cultural heritage information, stored increasingly in a digital form in cultural institutions such as museums, archives, and specialized libraries is being used for several applications and by several actors, from public policy, tourism, app developers and software companies, schools and the general public at large. Due to the proliferation of digital cultural content sources there has been a boom in applications, and cultural heritage is seen as a valuable asset for tourism, culture, education and entertainment. The information from those sources must be format independent, multi-lingual to attract a global audience, multi-purpose, and make use of standards, norms and national and international recommendations in order to fulfill different requirements of a diverse range of users, essentially mobile. The authors describe an inventory and content management system and the conceptual and architectural choices that were made to allow its evolution, standards' compliance and multi-purpose use as a cultural data provider. This article also describes current metadata efforts, metadata formats and ontologies specific to the cultural heritage domain and how they have been used to face the current challenges in this area such as providing engaging user experiences.