A Cultural Heritage Application Schema: Achieving Interoperability of Cultural Heritage Data in INSPIRE

Cultural Heritage is a group of resources identified as a reflection of certain values, beliefs, knowledge and tradition by a certain community. These resources are subject to management, preservation and diffusion through legislative and administrative means, which makes cultural heritage fall within the scope of Protected sites, one of the spatial data themes established in Annex I of the INSPIRE Directive. The INSPIRE Data Specification on Protected Sites thus serves as the starting point for modelling cultural heritage information in order to implement, distribute and share it in an interoperable framework based on Spatial Data Infrastructures. Unfortunately, this data specification was primarily conceived for natural protected sites, which makes an extension necessary if it is to be applied to cultural features. This paper proposes an extension composed of three parts: one devoted to administrative information -including legal protection-, another describes the feature itself, and, a third part is dedicated to the inclusion of additional documentation (texts, images, etc.).