CULTOS: Towards a World-Wide Digital Collection of Exchangeable Units of Multimedia Content for Intertextual Studies∗

It is the aim of the CULTOS project to provide researchers in intertextual studies with a collaborative multimedia platform for the authoring, management, search, exchange, and presentation of Intertextual Threads (ITTs), knowledge structures that interrelate and compare cultural artefacts. By means of the CULTOS platform, researchers will be able to create a world-wide collection of multimedia-enhanced ITTs comparing cultural artefacts from different personal and cultural backgrounds. This constitutes a valuable contribution for comparative studies and cultural heritage. In this paper, we propose and formally define Enhanced Multimedia Meta Objects (Emmos) as a new means for representing multimedia content. Emmos are unique in that they combine three different aspects of multimedia content: the individual media objects making up the content, semantic relationships between those media objects, and functionality on the content. With Emmos, we obtain an adequate means for the representation of multimedia-enriched ITTs as the foundation for the worldwide distributed collection of ITTs envisioned by CULTOS.