Cultural Heritage Forum Design

The CIPHER project was set up in April 2002 as a thirty month project supported by the European Union. The project aims to give the public new ways of accessing cultural heritage information from around Europe using new technologies. These technologies are intended to help organise knowledge and cultural heritage narratives. The technology helps to present these narratives on the internet and provides editing, communication and discussion tools. Visitors are able to customise and add to these narratives using tools provided by the partners. One of the principle activities of the project is the establishment of Cultural Heritage (CH) Forums. A cultural heritage forum is a portal website, in some cases associated with an actual place and concerned with some aspect of shared cultural heritage. A CH forum allows all those interested in its content to explore, learn, interact with and add information to the site. The CIPHER partners have developed technology, tools and methods for making successful and sustainable forums. These tools and technologies are showcased using a number of specific forums. This paper is concerned with the development of the Irish Cultural Heritage Forum – explorer. This forum was developed by The Dublin Institute of Technology and The Discovery Programme and gives online access to a database of Irish archaeology held by the Discovery Programme. This includes the complete National Monuments Record (NMR). The NMR is a list of categorised and detailed monument data for Ireland and Northern Ireland showing, for example, a monument's geographical position. Importantly the forum provides access to a large set of 'lessons' explaining and putting into context these monuments and artifacts. These lessons are primarily short texts which explain some aspect of Irish archaeology. The CH forum uses knowledge management techniques developed by the CIPHER partners including a specially adapted ontology of archaeological objects and concepts. The prototype application allows authors and ordinary users of the site to relate their own lessons to this ontology and in this way to construct a broad ranging but structured description of the domain of Irish archaeology.