Foundational Research

Baseline Study

To ensure the project effectively capitalizes on existing work—whether in cultural heritage or other relevant fields, such as analytical chemistry, forensics, or digital imaging—a baseline study will be performed. The study will summarize relevant existing projects' aims and scope, milestones, progress-to-date, pitfalls and limitations, and lessons learned during the projects' development and execution. Additionally, models for open-source and open data projects will be reviewed.

Use Cases

To ensure that the data integration environment ultimately developed meets the research needs of the different potential user groups (stakeholders), comprehensive use cases will be prepared. Use case analysis is a technique commonly employed in software development to identify the necessary functional requirements through an analysis of the needs of each group of potential end-users. For the cultural heritage research community, end-user groups will include practicing conservators, scientists, and curators, as well as academic research partners and other constituents active in cultural heritage research.

Review of Standards and Software Tools

Successful data integration will also require the development of common metadata standards and standard ontologies, agreed upon by the international cultural heritage community. Therefore the project team will undertake a review of existing relevant standards for the core data (i.e., technical conservation images and scientific data) and associated metadata, as well as existing relevant dedicated vocabularies and ontologies necessary to enable a linked open data approach to data integration.

Page updated: December 2014