The Ecumene Experience to Data Integration in Cultural Heritage Web Information Systems

A number of diverse data sources on cultural/artistic heritage, hosted by local institutions, may provide a rich collection of study material for experts in this field. Anyway, a wide exploitation of such a huge amount of information is hampered by the heterogeneity and the physical distribution of data sources. The experience presented here relates to problems and solutions found in making use of this kind of data sources within a single Web Information System that offers a framework for accessing the artistic/cultural information. In particular, design issues in dealing with metadata are discussed, as well as architectural aspects from the metadata harvesting to the presentation tier. All the system leverages the web infrastructure to cope with both organizational and technological diversity among the composing modules.