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Synthesis-Core is a cultural information system for scientific and administrative documentation of cultural entities. It supports a generic and flexible workflow for documentation, provides an online work environment specifically designed to document entities (tangible or intangible) and cultural processes (scientific and administative), e.g. collections of objects and audiovisual material of cultural content, museum objects, works of art, monuments, archeological sites and places, scientific instruments, scientific works, etc. and for all types of access e.g. administrative, scientific, etc. It is also multilingual and provides data exchange in XML / RDF with other systems, web presentations, etc. The use of XML / RDF in data exchange offers information validity, longevity and interconnectivity.
The scientific documentation includes the cultural data that concerns a cultural instance, for example the creator, the date and the place of creation, its style, its use, its discovery, its correlation with other cultural instances, people, historical events etc. The data model of Synthesis-Core is fully compatible with ISO 21127.
The administrative documentation includes all the data that concerns the administration procedures of a cultural entity such as exhibitions, movements to and from other cultural entities, ownership etc. Synthesis-Core follows Spectrum international standard.
The system exploits multi layered architectures, open source software, international standards XML and RDF technologies, and provides remarkable capabilities as described below:
The information about the entities is organized in electronic forms and catalogs, which:
The semantic model of the data is fully compatible with ISO 21127.
Synthesis-Core supports the documentation for cultural entities, such as:
Forms related to new entities can be created, while it is possible to expand existing forms.
Synthesis-Core provides functions to the users for:
It also provides the following subsystems:
Additionally, in terms of file management, Synthesis-Core supports the ability to store files of different types (image, text, audio, video, etc.) in an internal storage structure or using cloud services.
It also provides increased levels of information security and confidentiality. This is achieved by using secure network connections (https protocol), user authorization / authentication mechanisms, and data encryption. At the same time there is harmonization with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR compliance).
Synthesis-Core supports a security system that takes into account user groups with different permissions. The roles that can be assigned to a user are the following:
Synthesis-Core user authentication is based on open source software, which allows single sign-on (SSO), an authentication scheme that allows a user to connect with a single ID to any of the many relevant but independent software systems.
Synthesis-Core supports specific worklows that can be customized to meet the requirements of an organization. The process model supported by Synthesis-Core allows (inter alia) users - members of an organization or external partners of an organization to create, edit, publish and withdraw cultural-entity forms.
An example of a workflow is as follows: The organization's documentation coordinator (or someone with similar responsibilities) can create entityforms for information entry. These forms are assigned to editorial teams or individual users (authors) in order to collect, edit and record information about the subject. Once the information processing is complete, one of the members of the editorial team or the individual user "marks" the form for publication (the form is marked as "under publication" and ceases to be available for editing). The agency's documentation coordinator (or someone with similar responsibility) publishes it. If for any reason the form is not published, the form is returned to its authors for review or revision, marked as "unpublished" and the reason why it was not published is optionally noted, and its authors can edit it again and request re-post it. If for any reason a published form needs modification, the author may ask the organization's documentation coordinator to withdraw it. The form is then returned for review to its authors, who can edit it and request its re-publication.
Each author can view and edit the forms of which he / she is an author. It can also view (but not edit) the forms of other authors of the institution. Published forms can be viewed by all system users without being able to edit them. The information entered in the forms is conceptually structured and allows an author-user to select the sections he or she is interested in documenting.
Synthesis-Core provides the ability to interface with other systems for the information exchange. The interface can be achieved using the Synthesis-API (REST-API), which offers the basic search, access and content management capabilities provided by the software. In addition, data can be exported and made available for use by other content management systems (CMS, etc.) and / or other databases (RDBMS, noSQL, triplestores, etc.).
The functionality, the features and the use of Synthesis-Core in the following:
For more information contact Chrysoula Bekiari
