Proposal: Cultural Heritage Information Package

Over the past decades, data scientists, cultural heritage professionals, and digital humanities scholars have laid the foundation for a robust cultural heritage cloud by leveraging web semantics and ontology-driven approaches. At the same time however, the proliferation of digital data (digtization of analogs, borne digital) of increasingly different types threatens fragmentation and the erosion of meaning and human expertise. The current proposal is for a new information product, the Cultural Heritage Information Package (CHIP). The CHIP fuses four concepts: 1) concern for cultural heritage items, 2) a semantically-structured narrative of the concern, one that bridges the gap, on the one hand, between vast quantities of complex data and, on the other hand, pure textual narratives, 3) an annotated bibliography of citations, and 4) links out to authoritative representations of the cultural heritage items of concern as well as to bibliographic citations. The use of the term concern is meant both to emphasize the commitment to care for cultural heritage but also to place each CHIP in a continuum of cultural heritage practice. This placement within the continuum thus establishes a framework within which cultural heritage professionals can collaborate and integrate workflows. The CHIP, the concept of curated CHIPs, a federated architecture for authoring, researching and serving CHIPs, and the embedding of human expertise are all discussed.