Cultural Heritage documents deal with objects/artifacts and the people that created, owned, used, or (re)discovered them. Their fates are intertwined in unique and complex stories forming a
cumulative body of knowledge, often fragmented across large online document collections. While our collective memory has explicitly documented these stories, the heterogeneity and distribution
of the available sources creates islands of information that can only be implicitly connected by a limited, expert audience. This paper presents a semantically consistent framework for the online presence of Cultural Heritage document collections, set upon a participatory centre stage and supported by a shared knowledge model, the CIDOC CRM ontology. In this framework,
Cultural Heritage document contributors are peer-to-peer network nodes that beneÞ t from: a schema-based network topology; a transparent, self-organised, self-optimised network infrastructure;
knowledge-rich document processing modules which analyse and classify each contribution, capture the notion of time and the unfolding of events spanning a single or multiple documents,
and establish meaning connectivity over the entire collection. Overall, this framework assists a scholarly audience with the exploration of online distributed Cultural Heritage document collections, and offers an informed tap into the collective
memory scattered therein. Cultural Heritage documents deal with objects/ artifacts and the people that created, owned, used,
or (re)discovered them. Their fates are intertwined in unique and complex stories forming a cumulative body of knowledge, often fragmented across online document collections. While our collective
memory has explicitly documented these stories, the heterogeneity of the available sources creates islands of information that can only be implicitly connected by a limited, expert audience. This paper presents a semantically consistent framework for the online presence of Cultural Heritage document collections, set upon a participatory centre stage and supported by a shared knowledge
model. In this framework, Cultural Heritage document contributors beneÞ t from knowledgerich document processing modules which analyse and classify each contribution, capture the notion of time and the unfolding of events spanning a single or multiple documents, and establish meaning connectivity over the entire collection. Overall, this framework assists a scholarly audience with the exploration of online Cultural Heritage document collections, and offers an informed tap into the collective memory scattered therein
