Description of service
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. This online service
will:
- be actively supported and endorsed by the national governments
and agencies responsible for cultural heritage (typically cultural
ministries and dedicated national agencies);
- be based on standard and open-source technologies, built upon
an existing platform;
- be flexible and extensible in terms of adding additional nations
to the scope of the resource;
- implement the newly-agreed trans-European standards and guidelines
for digital cultural heritage initiatives, as agreed by the eEurope
National Representatives Group (NRG) for the Digitisation of Cultural
Heritage.
In addition, the project will localize and install the same platform
within the participating nations, so that similar services at a national
level will be available. This will mean that the end users of national
inventories and cultural portals will not need to learn new paradigms
and approaches when utilizing the cultural services of other countries.
It will also mean that a common approach and model of digital cultural
heritage services will be applied across the participating nations,
and that this approach reflects the agreements of the National Representatives
Group.
The MICHAEL project builds upon the following existing assets:
- the common meta-data standard for Inventories of digitisation
projects agreed by the National Representatives Group;
- the methodology and resources established by the Minerva project,
an IST Coordination Action which involves the cultural ministries
of a large number of European nations, including most of the MICHAEL
consortium. The Minerva project has already achieved certain of
the Lund Action Plan objectives; the MICHAEL project will make further
progress towards the Lund Action Plan aims;
- the technical platform used in the French
inventory project, which includes application server, search
engine, publishing framework and application generation functions.
This technical platform is built upon open-source, de facto standard
software components including Apache Cocoon publishing framework,
Apache Tomcat servlet engine, Jakarta Lucene search engine and the
XtoGen application generator.
