CULTURA: A Metadata-Rich Environment to Support the Enhanced Interrogation of Cultural Collections

Abstract

Abstract. The increased digitisation of cultural collections, and their availability on the World Wide Web, has made access to these valuable documents much easier than ever before. However, despite the increased availability of access to cultural archives, curators still struggle to instigate and enhance engagement with these resources. The CULTURA project is actively addressing this issue through the development of a metadata-driven personalisation environment for navigating cultural collections and instigating collaborations. The corpus agnostic CULTURA environment also supports a full spectrum of users: ranging from professional researchers seeking patterns in the data and trying to answer complex queries; to interested members of the public who need help navigating a vast collection of resources. This paper discusses the state of the art in this area and the various innovative approaches used in the CULTURA project, with a special focus on how the underlying metadata helps facilitate its semantically rich environment.

Design and implementation of a Web application for Cultural Heritage

“…However, it covers more aspects that are important in the context of digital humanities, such as data provenance, data quality, etc. Another important initiative is the CULTURA project [9], which develops a metadata-driven personalization environment to navigate collections. In addition, it supports different categories of users, such as professional researchers and simple users.…”

Enhancing End User Access to Cultural Heritage Systems: Tailored Narratives and Human-Centered Computing

“…This new environment was named IPSA@CULTURA to underline that the IPSA content was being used with tools and services of the CULTURA environment 3 . CULTURA provides a service-oriented architecture, where the user can interact with a number of functions that have been developed and are maintained by partners of the project; the portal was developed using Drupal by the research group of the Trinity College Dublin [2].…”

Evaluating the Deployment of a Collection of Images in the CULTURA Environment

“…CULTURA provides a service-oriented architecture, where the user can interact with a number of functions that have been developed and are maintained by partners of the project [6]. The portal was developed using Drupal 5 by the research group of the Trinity College Dublin [7], which also developed the search functions, while our group provides two services. The first of these is an annotation service that allows users to add content to the illustrations and their metadata and share them with all users or a selected group of users.…”

“…It takes into account both the technical and the organisational issues involved in digital libraries, developing criteria and methods that exploit the strengths of digital libraries in a socio-economic and interdisciplinary manner. DILL is offered in cooperation with Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences (Norway), Tallinn University (Estonia), and the University of Parma (Italy) 7 . Students are therefore requested to spend at least one semester at each institution.…”