Coping with interoperability and sustainability in cultural heritage aggregative data infrastructures

The Cultural Heritage (CH) community is one of the most active in the realisation of Aggregative Data Infrastructures (ADIs). ADIs provide tools to integrate data sources to form uniform and richer information spaces. The realisation of ADIs for CH must be based on technology capable of coping with complex interoperability issues and sustainability issues. In this paper, we present the D-NET software toolkit framework and services, devised for the realisation of sustainable and customisable ADIs. In particular, we demonstrate the effectiveness of D-NET in the CH scenario by describing its usage in the realisation of a real-case ADI for the EC project Heritage of the People's Europe (HOPE). The HOPE ADI uses D-NET to implement a two-phase metadata conversion methodology that addresses data interoperability issues while facilitating sustainability by encouraging participation of data sources.