Mexico’s Tradition and Culture Entering the Digital Age: The Mexican Cultural Heritage Repository Project
Metadata
Show full item recordEditorial
MDPI
Materia
Data model development CIDOC-CRM Terminology Mexican cultural heritage
Date
2019-01-26Referencia bibliográfica
Morales-del-Castillo, José M.; Ángeles Jiménez, Pedro; Molina Salinas, Claudio. Mexico’s Tradition and Culture Entering the Digital Age: The Mexican Cultural Heritage Repository Project. Heritage 2019, 2, 356–365. [http://hdl.handle.net/10481/54842]
Sponsorship
This research was funded by the Secretaría de Cultura of Mexico.Abstract
Mexico is a country with a vast and extraordinary cultural heritage, which is the result of
a rich history of cultural exchange, syncretism and transculturation. This rich culture has been
materialized through the consolidation of a long and prestigious museum tradition, which at
the same time is sadly characterized by an endemic lack of technological resources rather than
professional skills. As a result, we have found that Mexican museums produce very heterogeneous
forms of documentation, which are often not even managed using information technologies.
Furthermore, most museums deploy ad hoc solutions that directly limit the usefulness and value of
the documentation process itself. In response, the recently founded Mexican Ministry of Culture is
undertaking the development of the Mexican cultural heritage data model (Modelo de Datos México),
which is aimed at contributing to the cultural heritage domain of our country through the correct
characterization and documentation of its cultural objects. It is the first documented experience
in Mexico of a large-scale data model inspired by CIDOC-CRM, which is complemented by a set
of terminological tools that attempt to capture the singularities and idiosyncrasies of the Mexican
cultural sector. In the present paper, we will describe the motivations and decisions made so far to
optimize the data model to the Mexican reality and the development of the project that will define a
set of local terminologies built on the expertise of linguists, information architects, developers and
especially, museum professionals.