The Italian Culture Portal: a Project for Interoperability and Open Distribution of Cultural Contents

The Italian culture portal will be a media for knowledge of Italian cultural tangible and un- tangible heritage. It will provide one access to existing digitised information and wider visibility to museums, libraries, archives, and cultural bodies. Without duplicating data, the portal will harvest metadata from several data-sources, using the protocol for metadata harvesting of OAI; metadata could be also provided to national and international super-portals. As metadata standard, Dublin Core has been adopted. On the basis of qualified DC, defined to reduce loss of information and allow a more efficient retrieval, an application profile (PICO AP) has been specially developed, introducing new types, element-refinements and encoding schemes. This metadata schema will assure interoperability and allow indexing, browsing and query functions on the ensemble of information. Through the one access point of the Portal, users will find resources from various repositories browsing by object categories, subjects, places, dates, and people.