An experimental Information Grid environment for Cultural Heritage Knowledge Sharing

In this paper the authors address the problems of making existing distributed collection document repositories mutually interoperable at the semantic level. The authors argue that semantic web technologies offer a promising approach to facilitate homogeneous, semantic information retrieval based on heterogeneous document repositories on the web. From contents point of view, the distributed system is built as a collection of multimedia documents repository nodes glued together by an ontology server. A set of methodologies and tools for organizing the information space around the notion of contents community is developed, where each content provider will publish a set of ontologies to collect metadata information organized and published through the Contents Community Authority on top of an ontology server. These methodologies were deployed setting up a prototype to connect about 20 museums in the city of Naples (Italy).