With a view to contributing and boosting the digitalisation, full use and enhancement of the resources available on the web, the new interface of the General Catalog of Cultural Heritage has been published catalogue.beniculturali.it which makes use of the most innovative technologies known to date for the sharing of open data on the Italian cultural heritage present on the net.
Presented the General Catalog of Cultural Heritage, a new portal created by the ICCD - Central Institute for Cataloging and Documentation - which contains data and information on Italian cultural heritage. The new interface of the General Catalog of Cultural Heritage exploits the most innovative technologies known to date and opens up to a vast and potentially infinite vision and sharing of the heritage, connecting, starting today and for years to come, to the virtual data shared in network from institutions or individuals in a free, free and open format. A simple but advanced tool of democracy and knowledge that is thus delivered into the hands of each citizen, giving the possibility to navigate in the vast sea of knowledge by following information maps connected to each other.
The new consultation interface, in fact, adheres to the national policy of opening data to allow their connection to other data on cultural heritage, according to the Linked Open Data paradigm. Linked Open Data is data in an open format that can be linked to other data. They facilitate the reuse of resources published on the web and the interconnection of data through similarity or equality mechanisms, favoring the expansion of the initial information assets.
Il portal is an advanced and intelligent version that implements and surpasses the previous platform, allowing the public today to monitor more than 14.000 places of culture and access 1.250.000 catalog entries destined to become 2 million in the next few days as the activities of publication.
«With this new approach to the Catalogue, the ICCD intends to make the entire patrimony of files created so far usable by consolidating dynamic procedures for the growth of a certified, updated and representative map - the knowledge graph of the Italian cultural heritage - created thanks to a interface capable of fully exploiting the research potential connected to the new data publication paradigm". Explains Carlo Birrozzi, Director of the ICCD.
Through the use of Linked Open Data, the data of the catalog cards were automatically linked with the data present in the photographic archives of the ICCD with the aim of giving coherence to the complex of cataloging contents and photographic images on the heritage that have been managed up to now by the ICCD on two separate databases.
The new site of the Catalog also provides for the integration of the open data of the regional catalogs of cultural heritage published by the Regions and, in general, of the data of other information systems to offer an increasingly complete, updated, integrated and participatory system.
In the new Catalogue, the data is made accessible above all through aggregations by author and cultural site. The navigation of each item in the Catalog is supplemented by contextual information; in fact, a specific function allows the user to retrieve – from a preselection made by the ICCD – other web links useful for deepening knowledge on the authors of the sought-after cultural asset and, to some extent, also on the works.
The portal is the second one made in the last year by the ICCD which already in the midst of the first lockdown had launched #scenedaunpatrimonio, a virtual space created to narrate cultural heritage through private and family photography. The launch operation is accompanied by a video made by the director Paolo Santamaria, already the author of various campaigns for the MiC (L'arte ti somiglia, Io leggo e tu?) and beyond, who interpreted the activity carried out by the team valuing the entire operation and the passion put in place.
The Catalog platform will allow visitors to get to know, navigate and orient themselves in the vast sea of Italian cultural heritage.
MiBACT source
