A watermarking environment and a metadata digital image repository for the protection and management of digital images of the Hellenic cultural heritage

The paper addresses the implementation of a watermarking environment and of a metadata database system of digital images for the protection and management of the intellectual property rights of digitized material of the Hellenic cultural heritage. The work has been conducted as part of the Praxitelis Project, which was presented during the Culture Track of the WWW9 Conference in Amsterdam. This project is focusing on managing digital surrogates of high-quality photographs of artifacts, monuments and sites and on countering electronic "theft" of online digital material. The design and implementation of the project is under development by the High Performance Information Systems Laboratory (HPCLAB) of the department of Computer Engineering and Informatics of the University of Patras, Greece. The system is specifically applied to cultural heritage and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture (HMC) is the main user