Ontology-based access to multimedia cultural heritage collections - The REACH Project

In this paper, an approach for providing unified access to heterogeneous distributed cultural heritage collections is presented. The proposed approach is developed within the framework of the REACH Greek National Project with the overall aim to provide a web portal enabling access to different databases of cultural content with emphasis on multimedia material. In order to achieve this, the project employs ontology-based representation of cultural content, multimedia content-based search algorithms, hybrid ontology and content-based access and user-friendly search interfaces. This fusion approach provides users with resources for building queries of multimedia repositories sequentially using multiple individual search tools, and performs higher quality searching. In the current stage of development, real content such as inscriptions and coins from the Greco-Roman time period, has successfully been incorporated in the system.