About the Centre for Cultural Informatics

The Centre for Cultural Informatics is a specialized unit in the Information Systems Laboratory. It pursues a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary approach to supporting the entire lifecycle of cultural information and documentation procedures for the benefit of the preservation, study and promotion of cultural heritage. It provides a special focus to the relevant activities of ISL and the context for standing co-operations with cultural institutions and scientists from the humanities that range from pure research to real application development.

The operation of the Centre brings together skills in knowledge representation, ontology engineering, knowledge organisation systems, database technology and web technology with expertise in archaeology, museum documentation and management, sites and monuments management, art conservation, archives and libraries, thesaurus and dictionary management and other cultural disciplines.

Activities

The activities of the Centre unfold in three directions:

1. Targeted research with focus on the formal representation of information structure and scientific discourse in the humanities, in the machine - supported communication and in the semantic interoperability.
2. Community building for the promotion of standards, complementary skills and know-how in the creation, processing, integration and presentation of cultural information for the benefit of quality, accessibility and exploitation of digital cultural content.
3. Targeted development of advanced information systems that provide a scientific challenge or a proof -of -concept in real settings.

Results of these activities include:

• Cultural data models and standards

• Monuments' and museums' information systems

• Source material management systems

• Terminology systems

Besides others, the Centre works as competence center for the CIDOC-CRM (ISO 21127), by building up and exchanging application know-how, consultancy to implementers and researchers, and contribution to the dissemination, maintenance and evolution of the standard itself.

Collaborations

• CCI and the Germanisches National Museum - Nuremberg maintain a general collaboration on cultural-historical information processing and interdisciplinary research

• CCI provides an administrational home to the CIDOC-CRM Special Interest Group

• CCI has provided services to Institutions such as the Deutsches Museum – Munich, the Institut für Museumskunde – Berlin, the National Documentation Center – Athens and the European Centre of Byzantine & Postbyzantine Monuments (EKBMM) – Thessaloniki
  

Members

Division Head: Dr. Martin Doerr, Principal Researcher

Chrysoula Bekiari, M.Sc., R & D Engineer, Co-ordinator

Maria Theodoridou, M.A.Sc., R & D Engineer

Christos Georgis, M.Sc., R & D Engineer

Dimitris Agelakis, M. Sc., R & D Engineer

Anastasia Axaridou, R & D Engineer

Giorgos Samaritakis, R & D Engineer