A Hypermedia Afghan Sites and Monuments Database

Abstract

Cultural heritage management is an excellent application domain for geographical hypermedia information systems. Many people with different tasks and levels of profession like fieldworkers, researchers, project and campaign officers, cultural bureaucrats etc. collaboratively producing and consuming different media like photographs, video, drawings, books, etc. must deal with exact geographic information about moveable or unmovable objects of interest. Implemented information systems must obey all standards in the different domains to overcome classical failures of isolated solutions which do not scale beyond the scope of a single project. We present a conceptual approach which integrates geographic information, multimedia information, cultural heritage information and collaborative aspects in a single information model. This conceptual approach was used to design and implement a web-based information system on top of a single commercial database covering all mentioned aspects. This information system was deployed for a project in the conservation of cultural heritage in Afghanistan to prove the validity of the concepts.