Culture and knowledge portals

Creating portals which allow digital access to cultural and scientific artefacts and information is a central cultural and political challenge. The ultimate goal is to give the general public free Internet access to the digital representation of cultural heritage and scientific publications which would include millions upon millions of books, archive materials, images, sculptures, musical compositions plus sound recordings, movies and notes. The plan is that everyone would gain easy access from the comfort of their own home to an interface which provides tailor made tools necessary for making a targeted, detailed search for scientific, research and educational topics.

In reality, however, we face a range of organisational, logistical and technical challenges:

• Who will provide the data and how will they ingest it into the system? What does this process potentially look like?
• How do you solve the issue of multiple heterogeneous data formats?
• How can the content be semantically linked in an automated manner and will it be compatible with modern retrieval techniques?
• How do we address the copyright issue?
• How can we agree on a visual presentation that suits all data providers?

There is a whole range of other challenges too but many of the solutions have already been developed by the Fraunhofer IAIS and can be adjusted to your own specific needs.