| An Information Model for Virtual Museums. The case of an Ecomuseum. Abstract (2008) | |||||||||||||
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| This paper describes our current work in the area of Museum Information Systems, namely for crafts, ethnography and industry museums, where the main concern is to preserve and document not only material artifacts but also oral traditions, know-how, processes, cultural and social contexts, local history, sounds, tactile experiences and smells. Our case study is a Ecomuseum, in the North of Portugal. As such, the Museum will be also a tribute to the social and economic life of a whole region. We propose a conceptual approach for describing non-material heritage, its application to our case study, and we review current efforts that can be used and integrated in the museum community. As Museums, and other entities, move from dealing with tangible, material entities such as paintings, works of art, crafts, machines, to more intangible entities such contexts, implications between entities, history, traditions, there is a need for more semantically powerful and meaningful information models. There is also a shifting role that Museums, Libraries, Archives and similar institutions are playing now, with the possibilities the Internet and the Web have opened up. Although conceptual modeling techniques have been proposed in the late seventies, their application by the Museum and Information Sciences community has had to overcome the analysis | |||||||||||||
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