OntoBellini: Towards an RDA based ontology for Vincenzo Bellini's cultural heritage

The rich cultural heritage preserved in the Belliniano Civic Museum of Catania has been studied and promoted in the last years mainly thanks to the BellinInRete project. It includes collections of objects (or resources) of a very different nature: paintings, photos, pianos, autograph scores, manuscript leaves, books preserved in the Museum's library, etc. In order to make the Belliniano Museum's heritage interoperable and reusable by scholars and cultural operators, we propose to semantically organize it in a unique homogeneous container, the OntoBellini ontology, designed and developed according to the Linked Open Data and Semantic Web paradigms. The wide variety of the involved museum resources, not even fully digitalised and catalogued, led us to the idea of experimenting with the RDA (Resource Description and Access) standard for creating library and cultural heritage resource metadata. In this paper we describe the ongoing work towards the realization of the OntoBellini ontology.