A knowledge based portal for an easy access to cultural heritage resources and information: the “Digital Heritage” project

Oleg Missikoff¹ / Stefano Lariccia²

(¹LUISS University of Rome / ²La Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)

The COTEC Foundation, has promoted a project concerning the publication of a book on innovation in the heritage domain. As a relevant share of the text describes digital technologies applied to cultural heritage, it has been decided to create a web extension of the book for allowing readers to access multimedia contents. For reaching this goal the team working on this project has used a knowledge based, open source content management system called Plone.
The aim of the researchers working on this project, named Patrimonio Digitale (Digital Heritage, web site: http://www.patrimoniodigitale.it), was to create a knowledge repository that could help both general purpose users, as well as domain experts, finding knowledge on cultural heritage in the easiest possible way: allowing searches based on key words. According to this vision, the backbone of the site is represented by a thesaurus (to be soon upgraded to an ontology) where each term is concisely defined but points, through a hyperlink, to a new page where the term is defined more extensively. The “term page” constitutes a hub from which it is possible to deepen any aspect related to a term: scientific material, enterprises operating in that area, projects, best practices, multimedia contents, and so forth. This approach should facilitate the searches of any kind of user, no matter what they are looking for.
The chosen platform can also provide e-learning functionalities: in this context, some experimental features will be tested, such as innovative tools, good practices and methodologies adopted today for “distance learning” environments.