documenting cultural heritage in small museums - The CIDOC CRM

The customization work mainly concerned the user interface and hiding particular detailsrather than adding. Also some marginal fields were added or changed. In any case thedatabase design and function stayed unaffected by these changes.As a conclusion we may say that when transferring ontology into a data model, the datastructure represents an epistemology to manage the knowledge expressed by this ontology. Ifthe created epistemology is in line with the ontology and both follow the event patternmechanism, then the integration, mediation, adaptation and interchange of heterogeneousinformation are possible without loss of information. To use a well-crafted ontology asunderlying model and systematic understanding of the epistemological elements that have tobe added turned out to be extremely helpful to create a surprisingly generic data structure,even for quite specialized applications. The native XML technology fits perfectly to thedemands of cultural documentation systems.AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by Greek Information Society Operational Programme, measure1.3, Call 65 (“Standards for cultural documentation and support technologies for theintegration of digital cultural repositories and systems interoperability” Project Code 92402)10