Ontology-Based Metadata Integration in the Cultural Heritage Domain

In this paper, the authors propose an ontology-based metadata integration methodology for the cultural heritage domain. The proposed real-world approach considers an integration architecture in which CIDOC/CRM ontology acts as a mediating scheme. In this context, the authors present a mapping methodology from Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and Dublin Core (DC) metadata to CIDOC/CRM, and discuss the faced difficulties. Making cultural resources accessible requires rich metadata structures, able to cover the variety of material held in memory institutions (such as archives, bibliographic and electronic material).