Geotour incorporates content from SearchCulture.gr, Greece’s National Digital Cultural Heritage Aggregator. As you browse the listings, you might find links to relevant archival material from SearchCulture.gr. These resources provide additional context and information about the sites and monuments you encounter.
What is SearchCulture
SearchCulture.gr stands as the national gateway to the digital cultural heritage and contemporary artistic creations of Greece. Developed since 2012 by the National Documentation Centre (EKT), SearchCulture.gr offers a unified access point to the country’s rich and diverse cultural landscape, making it open, interoperable, reusable, and accessible for various communities, including researchers, educators, and the general public.
A Digital Public Space for Culture
The primary goal of SearchCulture.gr is to foster learning, creativity, inspiration, and innovation by creating a Digital Public Space for Culture. The platform serves as a repository for Greece’s digital cultural heritage, showcasing treasures from prehistoric times to the present day. Users can explore a vast collection of 2D and 3D representations of archaeological monuments, historical documents and manuscripts, folklore objects and heirlooms, works of fine art and religious art, cartographic material, audiovisual material of intangible cultural heritage, and books.
Collaboration and Contribution
SearchCulture.gr thrives on collaboration with major and minor cultural institutions across Greece, including museums, archives, archaeological services, municipalities, cultural foundations, art galleries, research centers, and libraries. These institutions contribute their digital collections, enriching the platform’s content and ensuring its comprehensiveness.
Advanced Search and Navigation
SearchCulture.gr offers advanced search and navigation capabilities, enabling users to explore hundreds of thousands of items through various criteria, including people, subjects, types of documents, historical periods, and locations. These features, coupled with curated thematic exhibitions that narrate stories through interconnected items, make SearchCulture.gr a model aggregator in Europe.
Open Access and Reuse
In line with Europeana’s policies, SearchCulture.gr facilitates the reuse of digital cultural heritage for educational, research, artistic, tourism, and creative purposes. The platform provides standardized usage licenses for each item, allowing users to utilize the content within the defined restrictions. This commitment to open access fosters creativity and knowledge generation through the use of cultural heritage.
Added Value and Standardization
SearchCulture.gr goes beyond aggregation by implementing extensive semantic enrichment processes. This involves standardizing and disambiguating metadata, ensuring accurate and efficient search results. By utilizing controlled vocabularies and Linked Data technologies, the platform enhances data quality, enables multilingual search, and supports semantic connections between items across different repositories.
Participation in Europeana
As the accredited national aggregator for Europeana, the European digital platform for cultural heritage, EKT contributes significantly to showcasing Greek content internationally. SearchCulture.gr adheres to Europeana’s standards, ensuring seamless integration and promoting the discoverability of Greek cultural heritage on a global scale.
Technological Infrastructure
SearchCulture.gr is built on a modern, modular infrastructure developed entirely by EKT. This infrastructure covers the entire content aggregation lifecycle, from harvesting and validation to semantic enrichment, secure preservation, and publication on Europeana. The platform employs cutting-edge technologies, including Java, Spring Framework, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Apache Solr, to provide a robust and scalable solution.
A History of Growth and Innovation
SearchCulture.gr’s development journey began in 2012, driven by the vision of consolidating Greek Digital Cultural Heritage. Through continuous upgrades and expansions, the platform has evolved into a mature and sophisticated aggregator, offering advanced search, navigation, and reuse capabilities.
The SearchCulture.gr team
The core team of SearchCulture.gr consists of:
- Dr. Haris Georgiadis, Scientific Lead and Principal Developer
- Georgia Aggelaki, Network Development and Outreach
- Agathi Papanoti, Data Ingestion and Semantic Enrichments
- Elena Lagoudi, Digital Curation
Contributors:
- Antonis Achoulias, Semantic enrichments and thematic exhibitions
- Despina Tihala, Semantic enrichments and thematic exhibitions
- Nasia Alevizou, Semantic enrichments and thematic exhibitions
- Dimitra Pelekanou, Graphic design
EKT staff members that have also contributed in the recent phase of development:
- Margarita Skandali (Graphic Design)
- Nikos Vassilogamvrakis, Alexia Panagopoulou, Anastasia Gasia and Maria Fasoi (Semantic Enrichments)
- Dimitris Charlaftis (upgrade to new software releases)
- Kostas Bekos (Copy Editing)
