Development of E-Government Services For Cultural Heritage: Examining the Key Dimensions

This article is aimed at defining a framework for the design of e-government services on cultural heritage. Starting from an analysis of three cases on digitization of different types of cultural objects, we highlight the problems existing in the creation of e-services on cultural heritage. These cases show the existence of four key issues in the development of this kind of information systems: digitization, requirement engineering, standardization, and interoperability. The proposed framework addresses these issues, focusing on the user requirements on one side, and the cultural object representation-which is the key to interoperability-on the other. In the cultural domain, the EU Lisbon strategy pushes for the compatibility of shared content across multiple, locally generated contents. Dynamic content exchange requires the use of a prescriptive framework for the development of cultural heritage Web sites. This article provides such a framework, using observation from concrete applications, knowledge of information systems development methodologies, and the IDEF0 modelling method.