Semantic Interoperability Support between Cultural and Multimedia Environments

Cultural heritage institutions are keeping descriptive information for myriads of cultural objects. This knowledge is organized and encoded using standards such as the CIDOC/CRM, Dublin Core, etc. The CIDOC/CRM standard is getting more and more acceptance as many cultural heritage institutions are adopting it by mapping their descriptive information into it as a means of semantic interoperation within the cultural heritage domain. In multimedia environments, lots of multimedia documents (images, documentaries, etc.) refer to cultural objects and are described in MPEG-7. Thus achieving interoperability between cultural heritage and multimedia environments is of great importance since it will allow one environment to semi-automatically exploit knowledge captured in the other. In this paper we propose a methodology for integrating the widely accepted standards MPEG-7 and CIDOC/CRM for multimedia and cultural heritage metadata representation respectively. The methodology allows the exploitation of existing cultural heritage information in automatically generating semantic multimedia annotations as well as the generation of cultural application interfaces (for cultural users) for MPEG-7