Combining the CIDOC CRM and MPEG-7 to Describe Multimedia in Museums

This paper describes a proposal for an interoperable metadata model, based on international standards, which has been designed to enable the description, exchange and sharing of multimedia resources both within and between cultural institutions. Domain-specific ontologies have been developed by two different ISO Working Groups to standardize the semantics associated with the description of museum objects (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model) and the description of multimedia content (MPEG-7) but no single ontology or metadata model exists for describing museum multimedia content. This paper describes an approach which combines the domain-specific aspects of MPEG-7 and CIDOC-CRM models into a single ontology for describing and managing multimedia in museums. The result is an extensible model which could lead to a common search interface and the open exchange, sharing and integration of heterogeneous multimedia resources distributed across cultural institutions.