The goal of this project is the integration of semantic Cultural Heritage applications with professional Geoinformation. Based on recent developments in both disciplines it will now be possible to create the conceptual basis and to implement systems that have the advantages of the two worlds and are in their combination more powerfull than just the simply addition of the two. The result will be a Cultural Geosemantic Information System, based on ISO standards for both disciplines. The implementation of this new approach will provide institutions and scientific projects of this domain with a methodology and a tool to present the history of cultural digital objects in their geographic context with state of the art geoinformation technologies. State of the art semantic tools will be available to perform spatial queries and integrate the data in the Linked Open Data Cloud to become part of the Semantic Web. Results can be applied to portals like ‘Europeana’, the European initiative with the goal to make Europe"s cultural and scientific heritage accessible to the public or to Research Infrastructures for interdisciplinary research in the humanities, just to name two.
The domain of Cultural Heritage Documentation is extremely interdisciplinary and therefore a system like this will bridge the gaps between various discipline specific conceptualisations. Methodological and conceptual base for the project is the ISO certified ontology of the CIDOC CRM (Conceptual Reference Model) for Cultural Heritage Documentation which was developed at the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation of Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH-ICS). For Geographic Information exists the extensive ISO 19100 Series as standard. The implementation research will be executed at the FORTH-ICS laboratory with its unique semantic infrastructure for Cultural Informatics. Part of it was just realized last year in the course of the EU funded 3D-COFORM project related to 3D collection formation.