DIGITAL CULTURAL HERITAGE ROADMAP FOR PRESERVATION

The amount of data produced by the Cultural Heritage sector is continually increasing thanks to the numerous initiatives put in place by the cultural institutions for the digitization of their content. This process has also been accelerated by the emergence of cultural portals including regional, national and thematic portals and the European cultural portal Europeana. The Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) sector also has the challenge of the complexity of the information itself. This is because of the relationship that each cultural object has with the collections it is part of, with the memory institutions where it is held, with the other objects of the same nature and/or culturally connected with it, and the many other types of relationships that represent the real scientific value of the digitised cultural object (be it a book, an archival record, an artefact from a museum, a sound recording or a video). Further, the investment in the production of the digital cultural heritage data is extremely high because the description of each object requires the human intervention of experts in the sector in order to associate the necessary metadata. Automatic extraction of knowledge ( metadata) from the digital representation of cultural items is still far from being at a production level. It is not yet commonly available or seamless to the cultural institutions that are engaged in the digitisation of their collections. In addition to the DCH content that derive from digitisation processes applied to the tangible heritage, also born digital cultural heritage is more and more a reality, particularly in the artistic scenario. Plastic artists are commonly using 3D modelling for their studies. Architects, writers, multimedia artists, graphic designers and almost all other artistic expressions produce data that need to be preserved for the researchers of today and for the future generations. Digital cultural data is therefore extremely precious and its preservation is more and more an imperative priority. This paper intends to discuss these matters in the light of the ongoing work carried out by the DCH-RP project (www.dch-rp.eu) funded by the European Commission.