Virtual Museums, Digital Reference Collections and E-science Environments

Authors

  • Guntram Geser
  • Franco Niccolucci

Keywords:

museums, content. collaboration, portals

Abstract

There are three main variants of virtual museums which focus on content, communication or collaboration. An emerging new variant could incorporate them as well as operate in an ecosystem of Web-based services that also comprises e-science infrastructures and educational portals. In this eco-system, digitised museum reference collections are important resources for escience environments of arts & humanities, natural history and other disciplines. But the semantics of digital collections and virtual museums should reflect the richness of cultural heritage content and contexts to allow for intelligent, concepts-based discovery, navigation and access. The CIDOC-CRM and the LIDO specification are key semantic resources in these respects.

Author Biographies

Guntram Geser

  Guntram Geser is a senior researcher and project manager at Salzburg Research, Austria. As principal researcher of the eCulture Group he has worked on many digital culture and heritage projects and co-edited publications such as “The Future Digital Heritage Space: An Expedition Report†(DigiCULT Thematic Issue 7, 2004); the “EPOCH Research Agenda for the Applications of ICT to Cultural Heritage†(Archaeolingua, 2008) and the “Report on Semantic Approaches for Including Digital Cultural and Bio-Heritage Resources in the European Digital Library Initiative†(STERNA Technology Watch Report 2009). Currently he is working on the EU FP7 Science in Society project CreativeCH - Creative Cooperation in Cultural Heritage <www.creative-heritage.eu> and two EU FP7 Infrastructure projects, agINFRA (focus: agricultural research <www.aginfra.eu>) and ARIADNE (focus: archaeology <www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu>).

Franco Niccolucci

Franco Niccolucci is a former professor at the University of Florence, Italy, now leading the VAST-Lab that is located at PIN - Servizi Didattici e Scientifici per l’Università di Firenze in Prato, Italy. He is also professor at The Cyprus Institute (CYI) in Nicosia, Cyprus, and acting director of the CYI Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center (STARC). His research interests include cultural semantics and methodological aspects of IT applications to cultural heritage. He is the author of several books and over 100 papers on digital heritage, and has chaired a number of international conferences on the subject. Currently he coordinates the FP7 Science in Society project CreativeCH - Creative Cooperation in Cultural Heritage <www.creative-heritage.eu>, the CIP ICT-PSP project 3D ICONS <www.3dicons-project.eu> and the FP7 Infrastructure project ARIADNE - Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe <www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu>.

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Published

12.05.2013

How to Cite

Geser, G., & Niccolucci, F. (2013). Virtual Museums, Digital Reference Collections and E-science Environments. Uncommon Culture, 3(5/6), 12–37. Retrieved from https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/UC/article/view/4714