eCultura, a semantically-enriched web-based approach to manage cultural contents

The eCultura project aims to provide a complete set of services and applications to access and integrate diverse web-based contents of the cultural domain. Semantic web technologies have enabled sharing information such services, as well as providing interoperability within external applications. The goal is to extend over the web the knowledge base of cultural institutions, building user communities around it and preparing for its exploitation in educational environments. Common W3C representation languages and ontologies have been used to describe common concepts of the cultural domain to provide a linked, interoperable environment. The semantic knowledge is stored on a shared OWL repository gathering the semantics of diverse cultural fields, including the CIDOC reference model, the FRBR ontology and the MusicOntology.