ABSTRACT
The digital medium offers an attractive means for preserving and presenting tangible, intangible, and natural heritage artifacts. It not only preserves a digital representation of heritage objects against the passage of time but also creates unique opportunities to present the objects in different ways, such as virtual walk-throughs and time-lapse techniques over the Internet. In recent times, the economics of computing and networking resources have created an opportunity for large-scale digitization of heritage artifacts for their broader dissemination over the Internet and for preservation. Many virtual galleries1
have been put in cyberspace by well-known museums and cultural heritage groups to interface with a global audience. Currently, most of such presentations available on these portals are hand-crafted and static. With the increase of collection sizes on the web, correlating different heritage artifacts and accessing the desired ones in a specific use-case context creates a significant cognitive load for the user. Of late, there have been some research efforts to facilitate semantic access in large heritage collections. Several research groups [100, 81, 193, 155] have proposed use of ontology in the semantic interpretation of multimedia data in collaborative multimedia and digital library projects. The ontology and the meta-data schemes are tightly coupled in these approaches, which necessitates creation of a central metadata scheme for the entire collection and prevents integration of data from heritage collections developed in a decentralized manner.
