The semantic Web and cultural heritage: ontologies and technologies help in accessing museum information

A virtual museum should support an interdisciplinary approach allowing to contextualize the objects through rich semantic associations. In the past much effort has been devoted to match scholar needs, implementing appropriate aids as authority files, thesauri, iconographic classification systems, common description schemas. However, the efforts towards a unified schema have all failed, as scholars have well established and solid cultural traditions, and are reluctant to accept a schema different from their own. Integration is often attempted at metadata level, but metadata vocabularies tend to diverge, and can't probably exploit the full richness of possible semantic associations. A more useful effort is to attempt to formulate a language as a base for