This poster proposes a theoretical framework for rethinking metadata for cultural heritage, and is motivated by the author¡¯s experience and observation of the challenges of descriptive metadata for cultural heritage. Descriptive metadata plays a key role in managing and providing access to cultural resources and in automatic reasoning on large data sets. Several metadata schemes are available in the domain of cultural heritage (i.e., VRA, CDWA, CCO, MIDAS, CIDOC-CRM, CIMI, SPECTRUM, and Object ID1); however, most of them have not systematically addressed the domain specific requirements of metadata. Thus, it is useful to rethink how intellectual developments of cultural heritage affect domain specific requirements of descriptive metadata.