Complete description (ps.gz file)

The very aim of the POLEMON Project, entitled "Co-ordinated Informatics Services for the Documentation, Management and Promotion of Cultural Heritage", was the creation of an information system for the National Monuments Record, together with an Integrated Museum Information System, for implementation at national level.

The main structural and functional features of the National Monuments Record system are as follows:

• It relates to fixed sites and moveable monuments, their interrelationship and chronological context.
• It supports administrative documentation of the monuments and objects.
• It is geographically dispersed, in line with the official administrative plan and distribution of departments within the Greek Ministry of Culture. Archival information is collected and undergoes specialist processing at local level, while the Directorate Monument Record and Publications within the Ministry of Culture is responsible for planning and co-ordination, and retrieves data mainly for administrative purposes.
• It is in line with the latest (Greek) legislation on Archaeology.
• Its architecture is that of a federated database system.
• It is connected to a system which supports mapping documentation and related functions.
• It can be linked to domain-specific cultural documentation databases which are compatible with those of the integrated museum information system.
• It can be linked to the Museum Information System.

Mapping support within the system includes the following features:

• Infrastructure for drawing up the National Monuments Survey using Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
• Land registry documentation to cover areas in the vicinity of monuments (mainly archaeological sites), within the framework of the geodesic and administrative reference grid of the National Land Register.
• Necessary requirements for the topographic recording of monuments.

Given that functional complementarity between the two systems is desired, they have been developed within a common methodological framework. The overall makeup of the two systems is congruent as far as information and functions are concerned. In particular:

• They both manage a formalised data corpus, which serves the needs of basic documentation and enables basic management tasks ("management documentation") to be carried out.
• They permit the development of specialist scholarly databases, to be used in storing the results of cultural research ("cultural documentation").
• They handle a variety of documentation material (photographs, plans, maps, documents etc.).
• They support terminological thesauruses.
• Data held on them can be used in "external" applications to which they have access (e.g. catalogue publication, interactive multimedia, land registers, monument preservation programmes etc.).
• They can be linked up to national and international cultural information networks.
• SIS (Semantic Index System) has been used for the development of both systems, so as to ensure their interoperability, high performance and smooth future development.