1 SEMANTIC INTEGRATION OF COLLECTION- LEVEL INFORMATION: A CROSSWALK

This paper is motivated by the demand for unified access, navigation and information retrieval from the wealth of composite, distributed and heterogeneous digital cultural collections. The last years, collection-level metadata is considered to be the key of integrated access of so many resources, since they represent the inherent and contextual characteristics of a collection. Our effort origins from the semantic interoperability perspective and considers CIDOC/CRM as the mediating schema, which integrates in an optimal way the semantics of the collection level metadata schemas and application profiles. In particular a crosswalk between Dublin Core Collections Application Profile and CIDOC/CRM is presented so that the semantics of each DCCAP element is mapped to CIDOC/CRM. The derived crosswalk is bidirectional implementing the mapping from DCCAP to CIDOC/CRM and vice versa. The paper reveals the complexity of mapping metadata schemas to ontologies and resolves particular difficulties providing a real world semantic integration case