Towards the Development of a Metadata Model for a Digital Cultural Heritage Collection with Focus on Provenance Information

Abstract

This project report describes the first steps of the development of a metadata model for the contextualization of heterogeneous objects from different cultural heritage collections with focus on provenance information. The project started with the assumption that aims and objectives of researchers working with cultural heritage collections differ from discipline to discipline. Accordingly, use cases and requirements for the description of objects are heterogeneous. To provide a model that would be usable not only within but also across academic disciplines the project needed to know where these requirements differ and where they match. Therefore the first part of the project was focused on the investigation of use cases and requirements. On the base of the common requirements a generic model will be build that allows the merging of data from a variety of disciplines using different metadata standards. The model’s structure will be a combination of prevalent metadata standards mapped to each other. Another peculiarity of the model will be the modular design of micro-ontologies, sets of domain-specific class structures that are, nevertheless, available on a meta-level in terms of substructures. Applying the DCMI dumb-down principle these subproperties and subclasses will be assigned to a who-what-where-when model, a base structure for the description of objects. The project divided the work process of the project into seven steps. As the project is still work in progress, only four steps will be explained in detail in this report. The three remaining steps will be presented in an outlook.