Cidoc CRM ontology in the context of digital cultural heritage environments

Abstract

With the recent rapid diffusion of distributed document bases on the international networks of the web, the matter of multilingual access and information retrieval is becoming increasingly relevant. Thus it is important to emphasize that Multilingual Access to content is used to increase and enhance users’ possibilities to access the Cultural Heritage Repositories and their content in their native or preferred language. The issue identified in this research is that the cultural heritage of countries is usually described in many different languages. Multilinguality in ontologies has shown an impending need for institutions worldwide with valuable linguistic resources in different languages. Since most ontologies are developed in one language, obtaining multilingual ontologies implies localizing or adapting them to a concrete language and culture community. In this article we describe the Cidoc CRM ontology, whose goal is to improve the user experience of cultural heritage content by making multilingual features more easily feasible.