The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Module

This ease has spurred an increasing interest from professionals, the general public, and consequently politicians to make publicly available the tremendous wealth of information kept in museums, archives, and libraries--the so-called memory organizations. Quite naturally, their development has focused on presentation, such as web sites and interfaces to their local databases. Now with more and more information becoming available, there is an increasing demand for targeted global search, comparative studies, data transfer, and data migration between heterogeneous sources of cultural contents. The reality of semantic interoperability is getting frustrating. In the cultural area alone, dozens of standard and hundreds of proprietary metadata and data structures exist as well as hundreds of terminology systems.