MICHAEL: Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe. Project description

Project description

The key objectives of the project are to add value to the European cultural heritage and to encourage interoperability and the use of common standards across major national digital cultural heritage initiatives. The MICHAEL project is a multi-national deployment of a cultural portal platform already in use in France. It focuses on the integration and alignment of many national initiatives in the digital cultural heritage sector, including the most important initiatives in France, Italy and the UK. The project will deliver interoperability of national cultural portal initiatives and a high-quality end-user service, which will facilitate the exploitation of European cultural content resources.

These national initiatives will take place regardless of the availability of funding from the eTen programme. However, support from eTen will enable the national bodies to devote resources to the integration and alignment of their initiatives, adding great value from the European perspective as well as facilitating the end-user.

The project will establish an international online service, which will allow its users to search, browse and examine multiple national cultural portals from a single point of access.

The end user will use the MICHAEL service to find and explore European cultural heritage material, which can be accessed over the Internet. This material may include learning resources, catalogue information or the description of physical collections; however, the majority of this material will be digitised cultural heritage assets such as images, 3D models and meta-data descriptions of archaeological sites, buildings, paintings, sculpture etc. etc.

Searching will be possible using both simple-text based search as well as search-by-category and search-with-meta-data, and potentially through the use of GIS to enable the creation of location-based services. The scope of the search can be restricted to a single country, to a number of countries or to all sites linked to the MICHAEL service. The common, agreed, meta-data model will increase the value of the results of cross-border searching. Its implementation is a key recommendation of the Lund Action Plan.
The MICHAEL service will be available on a multilingual basis; the MICHAEL platform will be localized for each country in the MICHAEL consortium, both those in the initial consortium and those who are recruited subsequently.