A Semi-Automated Systems Architecture for Cultural Heritage: Sustainable Solutions for Digitising Cultural Heritage

The loss of cultural diversity impacts international stability by undermining sustainable development goals. UNESCO is charged with promoting cultural diversity, guided by important, globally recognised, conventions. IFAC researchers have recently directed attention to the application of automation systems to the preservation of cultural heritage. This paper reports developments in digital cultural heritage and media automation. Using a human-centred approach, the paper presents a systems project which places culture at the centre of technical development. Leading metadata standards are surveyed and machine-readable ontological models proposed which can describe intangible and tangible cultural heritage as envisaged by UNESCO. This study proposes a digitisation process which encodes artefact properties in XML to be linked into the ontologies. It also synthesises an architecture to guide the work of a new research laboratory. This study embodies a new trans-disciplinary research agenda at the interface of systems engineering and the humanities.