eCultureMap

eCultureMap

eCultureMap: how cultural institutions can benefit from geolocalised content
text by Franc J. Zakrajsek (IPCHS), Vlasta Vodeb (UIRS)

The eCultureMap is created as a simple, interactive geographical map and is ready for use by the general public and professionals on mobile devices as well as on desktops. The booklet presents the guidelines for use and reuse of the eCultureMap content

(DOWLOAD IT: PDF, 7734 kb)

Foreword

This publication is the third in the same series dedicated to Geographic Information.

In 2011, within the Athena project, we published Digital cultural content: guidelines for geographic information. When seeing a museum object, a question of high interest is: where to find it? For that the knowledge of its geographic location is essential. These guidelines aim at providing basic information for the description of geographic locations. It needs to be implemented in such a way that the geographic location information is machine-readable and thus can be used also in Europeana and other relevant portals to identify the place of objects.

In 2013, within the Linked Heritage project, a second booklet was published: Geocoded Digital Cultural Content, focused on Geographic location, which is a very important attribute of a cultural heritage item. It can describe provenience, the current institution, as well as the location of the event or other related events. The added value of the geo-coded cultural content is in the browsing of cultural portals efficiently through space and time, and searching for content in a more user friendly way.

Now AthenaPlus dedicates this third publication to eCultureMap. “The eCultureMap is the effort of the Europeana partners to put their cultural content on the one single geographical knowledge map when ingesting their metadata to Europeana. The eCultureMap currently displays more than 2 millions objects from several Europeana projects as are Athena, Carare, LinkedHeritage, AthenaPlus, PartagePlus and others”. The eCultureMap is created as a simple, interactive geographical map and is ready for use by the general public and professionals on mobile devices as well as on desktops. This booklet presents the guidelines for use and reuse of the eCultureMap content.

We hope that it will be an helpful tool for the cultural heritage community.

Maria Teresa Natale
AthenaPlus Technical Coordinator