Semantic Interoperability Support between Cultural and Multimedia Environments Alexandros Ntousias, Nektarios Gioldasis, Chrisa Tsinaraki, Stavros Christodoulakis Laboratory of Distributed Multimedia Information Systems - Technical University of Crete {antousias, nektarios, chrisa, stavros}@ced.tuc.gr Abstract Cultural heritage institutions are keeping descriptive information for myriads of cultural objects. This knowledge is organized and encoded using standards such as the CIDOC/CRM, Dublin Core, etc. The CIDOC/CRM standard is getting more and more acceptance as many cultural heritage institutions are adopting it by mapping their descriptive information into it as a means of semantic interoperation within the cultural heritage domain. In multimedia environments, lots of multimedia documents (images, documentaries, etc.) refer to cultural objects and are described in MPEG-7. Thus achieving interoperability between cultural heritage and multimedia environments is of great importance since it will allow one environment to semi-automatically exploit knowledge captured in the other. In this paper we propose a methodology for integrating the widely accepted standards MPEG-7 and CIDOC/CRM for multimedia and cultural heritage metadata representation respectively. The methodology allows the exploitation of existing cultural heritage information in automatically generating semantic multimedia annotations as well as the generation of cultural application interfaces (for cultural users) for MPEG-7 environments. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.12 [Interoperability]: Data mapping; D.2.13 [Reusable Software]: Domain engineering; H.3.7 Digital Libraries; General Terms Management, Verification 1 Introduction The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) has been developed by the International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC) of International Council of Museums (ICOM) in order to integrate cultural heritage documentations and to serve as a mediation of semantic data interchange between cultural institutions. CIDOC/CRM has been accepted as an ISO standard (ISO21127) [ISO 2006] since September 12, 2006 and serves as a formal ontology that uses events to provide a connection amongst actors and material/immaterial things through the space and time extents. The ontology provides a rich conceptualization accommodating generic concepts such as Event, Place, Thing, Appellation, Time-Span, etc. as well as many sub-concepts of them. This rich but still generic conceptualization allows for accurate modeling of cultural heritage documentation that spans many different domains (history, science, arts, etc.) and also helps to achieve uniqueness of properties. CIDOC/CRM provides also an extensibility mechanism by employing the E.55Type construct. It is acting as a meta-class which allows further categorization of the default CIDOC/CRM concepts creating hierarchies of typologies. CIDOC/CRM is currently achieving wide acceptance as more and more cultural heritage institutions and organizations adopt it either as a means of cultural documentation or as a common model to which they map their existing cultural documentation in order to achieve interoperability with other cultural heritage institutions. Organizations that have adopted the CIDOC/CRM model include the English Heritage, the