Cultural Heritage on the Semantic Web - the Museum24

Our paper from Symposium "Digital Semantic Content across Cultures" held on 4-5 May 2006 in Louvre, Paris.

Abstract: Describing and storing multimedia documents in a way, which wouldmake them easily searchable, retrievable and exchangeable has been a longdiscussed problem. Most users of the web do not have mature searching strategies. Solutions are needed to improve the performance of full-text retrieval systems to find relevant information for ordinary users. This paper presents a semantic virtual museum publishing diverse cultural heritage material on the web. The system was developed under the project Museum24 – Virtual Museum of Jämsä Region (Museo24- Jämsän seudun virtuaalimuseo, www.museo24.fi). It shows how semantically rich and interrelated content can create a consistent semantic portal. Further, it introduces overall concept on how multimedia documents are being annotated with semi-automated methods and how the metainformation is managed and stored in a CIDOC-MPEG7 based ontology. It also discusses how the public and administrative interfaces are realising better user experience to provide the visitors useful search and navigation services and the maintenance personal quick and efficient workplace.