Ontotext wins landmark project with The British Museum

At the end of September Ontotext has been awarded a British Museum contract for a development stage of the ResearchSpace (RS) project. Ontotext will execute the contract in partnership with Sirma ITT (a sibling company within Sirma Group) and System Simulation (UK).

RS aims to support collaborative research projects for cultural heritage scholars and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. RS will implement a framework and hosted environment for web-based research, knowledge sharing and web publishing. RS intends to provide:

• Data and digital analysis tools.
• Collaboration tools.
• Semantic RDF data sources
• Data and digital management tools
• Web Publication
• A range of research tools to support various workflows, e.g. Image Annotation, Image Compare, Timeline and Geographical Mapping, Semantic Search, etc.

Semantic technology is at the core of this project because it provides an effective mechanism for research and collaboration across data from different organizations and projects.

• The system will be based on the CIDOC CRM ontology for the cultural heritage domain, which supports very generic description of cultural artifacts, related events (e.g. creation, acquisition, curation, conservation), annotations, research discourse.
• The system architecture is based on an integration of OWLIM as semantic repository and Nuxeo as CMS/DMS.The OWLIM features that make it an important part of the architecture include: powerful reasoning (equivalent to OWL2 RL), fast performance, efficient multi-user access, and incremental assert and retract.

The current development stage (Stage3) will be 8 months long. RS is an IT environment to enable collaborative international research projects. RS will be open source and will support community development.

The contract award reconfirms Ontotext as experts in developing semantic applications for the cultural heritage domain.