Bringing New Life to Video Narratives for Exploring Cultural Heritage

In this paper we present a project of creating a web based interactive encyclopedia of historical knowledge related to the history of the religions, the Bible and the history in general. The main source of information in the project is a film made by the Israel Museum that accompanies the exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls the oldest remaining copies of the Bible and extra Biblical documents. The film is describing the life of the members of the ancient community of Qumran that was behind the creation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In order to annotate the video we developed a data repository for creating and for linking various types of digital information to the video. Data stored in the repository is then used to develop tools for exploring the film and related annotations.