An ontology-based semantic integration for digital museums

This paper describes the design and implementation through prototyping of the architecture of a system for browsing and retrieving museum information based on concepts. Ontology for the museum domain, based on the CIDOC Concept Reference Model, is being developed as mediation of the architecture. The challenges of developing such a global ontology model and a mapping mechanism between the global schema and data sources of local museums are discussed. Web Services technology is employed to integrate heterogeneous and distributed data sources of local museums. Experimentations with our prototype have demonstrated that this architecture is stable and efficient.