Heritage Science and Cultural Heritage: standards and tools for establishing cross-domain data interoperability

This paper describes a system for documenting scientific data produced in Heritage Sciences. The system is built around a general meta-model, flexible enough to provide descriptions, in a formal language, of the datasets produced by scientific research. Resulting metadata can be re-encoded and published in multiple formats. The underlying metadata schema is inspired by CIDOC CRM principles for data modelling and maintains a full compatibility with CIDOC CRM ontology to capture provenance and foster interoperability with Cultural Heritage information. The use of a wide set of thesauri and controlled vocabularies guarantees internal coherence at data and metadata level. Applicability tests are underway at different institutions and a set of user interfaces has been designed to simplify and speed up the process of data gathering and metadata definition.