Integrating, Indexing and Querying the Tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage Available Online: The QueryLab Portal

Abstract

Cultural heritage inventories have been created to collect and preserve the culture and to allow the participation of stakeholders and communities, promoting and disseminating their knowledges. There are two types of inventories: those who give data access via web services or open data, and others which are closed to external access and can be visited only through dedicated web sites, generating data silo problems. The integration of data harvested from different archives enables to compare the cultures and traditions of places from opposite sides of the world, showing how people have more in common than expected. The purpose of the developed portal is to provide query tools managing the web services provided by cultural heritage databases in a transparent way, allowing the user to make a single query and obtain results from all inventories considered at the same time. Moreover, with the introduction of the ICH-Light model, specifically studied for the mapping of intangible heritage, data from inventories of this domain can also be harvested, indexed and integrated into the portal, allowing the creation of an environment dedicated to intangible data where traditions, knowledges, rituals and festive events can be found and searched all together.