documenting cultural heritage in small museums - The CIDOC CRM

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interoperability. Therefore the Centre for Cultural Informatics in ICS-FORTH has developeda detailed, but generic XML Schema of the proposed data model for museum objectdocumentation in close collaboration with a series of small museums and cultural institutionsin Greece, and a light-weighted database solution called “Synthesis”, which can easily beadapted to special requirements in order to keep customization cost low.The organization in XML [6] documents allows the dynamic exploitation of the data in theinternet and supports additional translations of the same document in more than onelanguage. It is the best solution for data exchange between cultural information systems.The system is implemented on eXist [7], a free-ware native XML database, with a multilayered architecture, Web interface and Web presentation. The use of this technology reducesdrastically the overhead for schema customization. Since the database handles the completedocument as information unit, the data entry can be detached from the database and dataimport and export is a non-issue. Changes in descriptional parts of the Schema do not affectthe management functions of the database, only the data entry and presentation forms.Multilingual editions are easily created and maintained as parallel documents. The systemsupports five languages, controlled vocabulary and term translations.An overview of the system architecture is presented in the figure 1.Client Machine J2EE Server Machine Database Server MachineClient TierWeb TierApplication TierDatabase TierWeb Client(Browser)Local Client(XMLSpyJAVA Application)HTTPServletsJSPSOAPWeb Services(WSDL)XML DBNativeXMLDatabaseExistMobile ClientSOAPApacheAXIS(SOAP)ImagesanddocumentsFigure 1: System architecture8
The main components of system are:• Database Server Tier• Web services – application tier• Client TierThe database Server Tier provides all the necessary operations and mechanism for storing,retrieving, updating the xml documents, binary objects and unstructured text and preservingtheir integrity constraints.The main part of the application is composed of web services. The web services implementall the functions of the system expect those which manipulate the user interface forms. Theweb services include all the system logic. Their implementation is based on J2EEtechnology(http://java.sun.com/j2ee/overview.html ). A web service is identified by a URL[IETF RFC 2717], or by a URI [IETF RFC 2396] and its programmatic interface and itsinteractions are defined and described in xml format.The use of J2EE technology ensures interoperability, encapsulation, availability, publication,extensibility, open architecture, expandability, adaptability, flexibility and low cost ofcreation and use. The client tier involves the management and the format of user screens. Ithas been built on internet browser (internet explorer), and makes use of java(http://java.sun.com/ ) and the Altova Authentic®2005(http://www.altova.com/download_authentic.html) xml editor.The system “synthesis” supports a generic workflow for documentation of cultural entitiesand provides functions for creating, editing, navigating and retrieving documents, for datamigration, for document translation and for associating documents of cultural entities withdocuments of additional entities like events persons, organizations, places, materials, photosetc..ConclusionsCustomizations of the system “synthesis” have been implemented for three differentorganizations. The first organization had to document the conservation works of Byzantinewall paintings and the monuments where the paintings belong, the second organization had todocument Byzantine monuments and sites and their objects and the third organization had todocument museum objects. The average time for each customization was about two weeks.9
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