eCultura, a Semantically-Enriched Web-Based
Approach to Manage Cultural Contents
Carlos M. Cornejo, Iván Ruiz-Rube and Juan Manuel Dodero
Dpt. of Computer Languages and System
University of Cádiz
Cádiz, Spain
{carlos.cornejo,ivan.ruiz,juanma.dodero}@uca.es
Abstract—The eCultura project aims at providing a complete
set of services and applications, to enhance the user experience
when accessing web-based contents of the cultural domain.
Semantic web technologies enable sharing information among
these services, as well as provide interoperability with external
systems. W3C knowledge representation languages and standards
are used to describe concepts of the cultural domain and provide
a semantically interoperable environment. Web 2.0 techniques are
used to build user communities around the shared information
of cultural institutions, having the specific goal of exploiting their
knowledge base in learning and educational environments. The
semantic knowledge is stored on a shared OWL repository gather-
ing the semantics of diverse cultural fields, including the CIDOC
reference model, the FRBR ontology and the MusicOntology.
Index Terms—eCultura; Semantic Web; Semantic Ecosystem;
semantic cultural heritage annotations.
I. INTRODUCTION
The World Wide Web is a space prepared for the exchange
of information among network platforms. Most of today’s web
content is design for human consumption, so the information
held in web sites is not understandable by computers. The aim
of linked data methods is to publish data on the Web and to
interlink them between different sources [1]. Web-analyzing
agents are able to process and interpret these semantic meta-
data domains as needed. Thus, all issues related to cooperation,
interoperability and accessibility through a semantic context
are growing up in order to have a full-represented domain
ready to get exploited. By endowing the Web more meaning
and, therefore, more semantics capabilities, you can get solu-
tions to common problems in finding information through the
use of common infrastructure, which can share, process and
transfer information easily.
The CIDOC CRM1 is intended to facilitate the integration,
mediation and interchange of heterogeneous cultural heritage
information. It is the culmination of more than a decade of
standards development work by the International Committee
for Documentation (CIDOC) of the International Council of
Museums (ICOM). It provides a common and extensible se-
mantic framework for which any cultural heritage information
can be mapped.
To obtain the proper definition of the data, the Semantic
Web uses ontologies to represent information [2]. Moving this
1CIDOC - http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/
context into the digital preservation of Cultural Heritage (CH)
the objetive is to address a new way of representing, analysing,
manipulating and managing different kinds of digital cultural
objects from different media sources [3]. In [4] the CIDOC
Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) is presented as a set of
definitions and a formal structure for describing the implicit
and explicit concepts and relationships used in cultural her-
itage documentation.
eCultura platform integrates DSO (domain-specific ontolo-
gies) such as music and time concepts. Music, like any art
form, is a cultural product. Given the need to link the music
and culture is necessary to find a model that genuinely define
the full extension of the music. The Music Ontology2 is
an attempt to link all the information about musical artists,
albums and tracks together, from several music knowledge
repositories. Also Time ontology3 has a representative case
of study in our cultural domain, for describing the temporal
content of Web pages, time interaction between resources and
so on. The ontology provides a vocabulary for expressing
facts about topological relations among instants and intervals,
together with information about durations, dates and times.
This article is structured as follows. First, section 2 goes
around aiming of our proposal and objetives. Then section 3
shows motivations we had to propose a solution to solve some
actual problems while applying semantic web techniques. In
section 4 we revise general issues of collaborative systems
as well as their advantages and disadvantages. Within section
5 and 6 we show the conceptual steps of our proposal and
present how eCultura project holds several applications for
common semantic benefits. Section 7 discusses some related
works proposed for similar functionality. Finally, section 8
draws some conclusions and provides an outlook to futurible
work.
II. OBJETIVE
eCultura platform aims at integrating data from digital
content applications that are relevant to the cultural heritage
domain. It offers a simple way for adding new knowledge to
the system by allowing the insertion of standard W3C formats.
2Music Ontology - http://musicontology.com/
3Time Ontology - http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-time/