Resumen de U. Porto Digital Museum project: towards convergence in university's information management

Maria Manuela Pinto, Susana Medina, Paula Menino Homen, Augusto Ribeiro, Marisa Monteiro, Rodolfo Matos, Alexandre Lourenço, Sara Oliveira

• The University of Porto (U.Porto) aims to promote its scientific and cultural heritage through digital media by providing the integrated aggregation of digital information and related metadata which is managed and preserved in archives, libraries, museums and other technology information systems and repositories.

  This goal is meant to be reached by a theoretical based approach and an information management intervention model – the MGSIU-AP (Active and Permanent University Information System Management Model), which support an intervention toolkit directed to U.Porto Museums. This toolkit is complemented by a learning through projects educational approach, a digital platform which considers, among others, semantics and systems' interoperability, a long term digital preservation repository and an online heritage discovery portal to be developed in the scope of the U.Porto Digital Museum, itself an ongoing interdisciplinary project. This paper describes and discusses the development and subsequent process’ model which has an inherent value of standardisation. It considers tools as CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), providing an extensible ontology for concepts and information in cultural heritage and museum documentation, the standard SPECTRUM 4.0, describing 21 management procedures in workflow format, along with the policies and minimum features required for the standards to be met. Here will also be presented the work in progress in the field of domain ontologies, framed by an interdisciplinary theoretical approach which crosses information science, information systems and museology in the context of a serviceoriented approach. Both goals and issues will also be examined.