A Taste of Cyprus's Cultural Heritage

There is a pressing need to define approaches and solutions to preserving, managing, visualising and disseminating Cultural Heritage both in Europe and globally. By achieving these goals, we would be much better placed to appreciate not only how common history is shared across nations but also the rich diversity that exists across the board. EuroMed 2010, an international conference on Digital Heritage, takes place 8-13 November in Cyprus. The event aims to offer a forum for sharing views and experiences, discussing initiatives and best practices, as well as the technical tools needed to preserve and manage cultural heritage in the digital age. The event shines the spotlight on current initiatives at national, European and international level as well as projects funded by private organisations.

Against this backdrop, DL.org is presenting its findings on interoperability, a complex concept along a wide multidimensional spectrum, encompassing data and metadata interoperability on the one side and  organisational, legal and policy interoperability on the other. DL.org is presenting a recent paper entitled “Building Large hetereogeneous interconnected Digital Library Infrastructures: The Interoperability Challenge”, co-authored by DL.org co-ordinating partners, Costantino Thanos, Donatella Castelli and Leonardo Candela from the Institute of Information Science and Technologies at the National Research Council of Italy. Costantino Thanos is representing the project at EuroMed 2010 along with a poster display. The paper focuses on:

• Describing a number of application scenarios where several interoperability issues are outlined.
• Defining interoperability and identifying impediments to interoperability between federated Digital Libraries.
  Presenting approaches to achieving interoperability.
• Identifying and describing several types of interoperability.
• Concluding remarks on best practices for implementing interoperability solutions.