Unified access to heterogeneous data in cultural heritage

This paper addresses the prototypical problem of a cultural heritage institution with the ambition to disclose all of its content in a single, unified system. Like other enterprises, these institutions have heterogeneous collections distributed over multiple legacy systems. Our approach is to turn the metadata retrieval problem into a free-text retrieval problem by an unconditional merging of the heterogeneous sub-collections and flattening of all meta-data structures. We investigate the viability of the approach by an extensive case study of a large museum. Our main findings are as follows: First, by converting all digital con-tent to text, and indexing it with a standard IR system, we can effectively build a unified system providing access to all data. Second, an initial empirical evaluation shows superior performance in comparison with the legacy systems currently in use by the institute. There-fore, our third and overall finding is that our approach is a viable option to give access to heterogeneous collections.