The Project of the Italian Culture Portal. a Standard Based Model for Interoperability amongst Cultural Heritage Data Sources

The paper describes the scientific and technical project carried out by SNS for the Italian Culture Portal, promoted by Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, as a media for knowledge and enhancement of Cultural Heritage. Its main mission is to communicate the ensemble of Italian culture, making available existing data and giving wider visibility to cultural websites. The Portal won't duplicate data in a central repository, on the opposite it will harvest metadata from external data-sources. The adoption of OAI-PMH will allow metadata migration from content providers to one or more harvesters, adding services as indexing and automatic classification. As the Portal must join very diverse contents assuring system scalability, it seemed unsuitable to use a datamodel with predefined Entities. Thus, accomplishing with world-wide used Standards, a Metadata Schema based on Dublin Core has been designed. As DC Element Set is very restricted and groups many information into one Element, Qualified DC, which refines DCES using Refinements and Encoding Schemes, has been preferred, in order to assure interoperability together with a minimum loss of information and more significant retrieval. Following DCMI recommendations, a DC Application Profile based on the domain of Italian Culture has been designed, adding new types of resources (‘Corporate Body’, ‘Physical Person’, ‘Project’), Refinements to define specifications and relations amongst Element and Encoding Schemes as controlled vocabularies and thesauri adopted by Italian cataloguing Standards. Finally the paper describes the design of the user interface, specially criteria for search and browse functionalities.