Building interoperability for United Kingdom historic environment information resources

Abstract

The paper will present the work of the Forum on Information Standards in Heritage (FISH) - www.fish-forum.info - in the development of standards and protocols to support interoperability between historic environment sector information systems. The paper describes barriers to interoperability within the sector. These originate in the unique character of the historic environment as an information source. Progress in the development of relevant standards is reviewed and emphasis placed upon community building to support standardisation. Current work to develop an XML-based interoperability 'toolkit' of schema and protocols to support knowledge-sharing networks is described. This will be based on current FISH standards along with the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, an emerging ISO standard ontology for cultural heritage information. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.