Development of E-Government Services For Cultural Heritage: Examining the Key Dimensions

This article is aimed at defining a framework for the design of e-government services on cultural heritage. Starting from an analysis of three cases on digitization of different types of cultural objects, we highlight the problems existing in the creation of e-services on cultural heritage. These cases show the existence of four key issues in the development of this kind of information systems: digitization, requirement engineering, standardization, and interoperability. The proposed framework addresses these issues, focusing on the user requirements on one side, and the cultural object representation—which is the key to interoperability—on the other. In the cultural domain, the EU Lisbon strategy pushes for the compatibility of shared content across multiple, locally generated contents. Dynamic content exchange requires the use of a prescriptive framework for the development of cultural heritage Web sites. This article provides such a framework, using observation from concrete applications, knowledge of information systems development methodologies, and the IDEF0 modelling method.