Supporting valorization of cultural heritage documentation: The TIVal portal approach

Valuable documents are included in the corpus of information, documentation, digital contents produced in the course of projects aimed at studying and defining a preservation (and possibly restoration) plan for a significant piece of cultural heritage. These documents could be exploited to effectively further valorize the cultural heritage and support its fruition by a wide audience of potential users. The TIVal project aims at supporting the integration of this kind of different, distinct and heterogeneous multimedia contents into a comprehensive and accessible portal. The latter proposes specific navigation paths, dynamically connecting the different contents according to a specific logical rationale of the path itself (e.g. show information supporting a critical analysis of a piece of cultural heritage). To support the dynamic creation of these paths, contents are organized by means of the adoption of a domain ontology derived from CIDOC CRM. The paper presents the rationale of the approach, the architecture of the system, the structure of the ontology, and relevant examples of its usage by specific navigation paths.