CULTURA: A Metadata-Rich Environment to Support the Enhanced Interrogation of Cultural Collections

The increased digitisation of cultural collections, and their availability on the World Wide Web, has made access to these valuable documents much easier than ever before. However, despite the increased availability of access to cultural archives, curators still struggle to instigate and enhance engagement with these resources. The CULTURA project is actively addressing this issue through the development of a metadata-driven personalisation environment for navigating cultural collections and instigating collaborations. The corpus agnostic CULTURA environment also supports a full spectrum of users: ranging from professional researchers seeking patterns in the data and trying to answer complex queries; to interested members of the public who need help navigating a vast collection of resources. This paper discusses the state of the art in this area and the various innovative approaches used in the CULTURA project, with a special focus on how the underlying metadata helps facilitate its semantically rich environment.