Integrating Dublin Core Metadata for Cultural Heritage Collections Using Ontologies

Abstract

Cultural heritage collections are related to historical events and depict the customs of human societies. Their main characteristic is that they consist of heterogeneous objects, which usually are described by a variety of metadata schemas. Dublin Core Metadata Initiative plays a significant role in the interoperability of such collections. This paper proposes the exploitation of the CIDOC/CRM ontology as a mediating schema to which metadata sources can be mapped and integrated. In this context a methodology for mapping DC Types Vocabulary terms to CIDOC/CRM is presented, demonstrating a real-world effort for ontology-based metadata integration.