The WWW attracts more and more the interest of museums and cultural organizations as a means to project cultural contents, but as well as to exchange information on an international level, addressing not only the typical museum visitor but also the professional curator, documentalist or scientist of any related discipline. The fact, that cultural spaces of the past cross our modern borders, but even more the scattering of cultural material objects all over the world, makes the possibility of cost-efficient international data- exchange very attractive to the professional community. See for instance the various locations of ``haystacks'' by Monet or of the medieval bronze from Benin, Africa.
Current WWW technology provides the necessary standardization and global communication structure, but existing tools are somehow limited to manage documents in a professional framework (poor data structures, dangling links, ad-hoc search engines, etc.). The AQUARELLE project (TELEMATICS Application Program of the European Commission, Project IE-2005 1996), relies on the fundamental concept of the Web and intends to provide a reliable and precise access to heterogeneous cultural data sources within an open federation of organizations for mutual benefit. According to the AQUARELLE vision each author of a given information component should be able to link directly a part of his own creation to another information asset created and updated by another author in the Web. The organization of cultural data into structured collections of primary material, called "folders" (a translation of the French term "dossiers"), will bring much more than a simple access to the existing information: linking and commenting relevant pieces of information belonging to different owners will add value to the information content itself. The overall AQUARELLE architecture is designed to guarantee referential integrity as well as to support the adequate high precision in reference and retrieval.
The AQUARELLE project has identified in an initial feasibility study several examples of such folders: sets of pictures collected by a publisher to edit a city guide; supporting documentation for exhibition preparation by museum curators; collections of information elements on monuments and sites at the "Inventaire General" of the French Ministry of Culture. Depending on the purpose, these collections may need considerable structuring in order to be useful. Relations between collected or referred data and opinions, meanings, domain knowledge, intended or actual use can be rather complex and will be supported by the tools developed in the project. Folders themselves will be a subject of data exchange, giving raise to a cooperative environment the potential of which yet has to be explored.
The strong involvement of user groups in the project helped to identify in a very early stage a series of important requirements specific to the professional aspect of the systems to be developed. It was required to provide high precision semantic indexing in fine granularity under the control of high quality terminology, preferably multilingual, whereas access by uncontrolled terms and data-mining aspects were regarded to be of secondary importance. Rather than using a fixed data structure, specific user groups need the possibility to customize their own data structures in the running system on demand. Finally, it was ranked high to have reliable metadata, especially on database contents.
AQUARELLE has finished the first design phase and it expects to present the first prototype implementation in early spring this year. Being a Technical Integration Project, it is going to solve with first priority the questions of interoperability and reliability of service, based on SGML and Z39.50 as key standards. This is a major subject of the close cooperation with the Consortium for Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI), which has so far concentrated its implementation efforts (the CHIO project) more on the support of the non-professional user. In addition, experiences from the RAMA project in the development of multimedia systems allowing museums to give access to their archives via telecommunication networks, are also valuable in the context of AQUARELLE. Finally, there is also a cooperation with the Getty Information Institute on thesaurus use and multilinguality.
Isolated components of the first prototype exist, and the overall component integration begins in March 1997. Very good progress has been made, which allows us to present here a realistic view of the system to be, but moreover to discuss aspects of its use.
The current paper concentrates on the folder management and indexing, which comes right now into its first prototype stage. Besides the description of the technical choices, we address consequences and open questions of user procedures and organization, which emerged so far or are expected to be outcome of the practical experiences with the system.