CIPHER Project Summary - The Approach

The overall objective of the CIPHER project stated in the original project proposal was "to develop the methodology and technology required to realise sustainable Cultural Heritage (CH) Forums that empower communities of interest to explore, research and build content". This objective was further described in terms of a number of more detailed goals categorised as the application, methodological and technical goals of the project. For the purposes of the project a CH Forum was defined as an online space associated with one or more communities of interest where members can participate and learn through exploring and contributing to a range of heritage resources around a common theme. Learning through participating in the activities of the community was the key organising principle for the project. Therefore, the approach taken was to develop four CH forums that would enable the project partners to collaboratively investigate the social and technical issues influencing the participation of communities of interest. The development of these CH Forums was the application goal of the project. Researching the social and technical issues involved was expressed in the methodological and technical goals of the project.

In order to encourage communities of interest to explore their cultural heritage the approach adopted at the beginning of the project was to develop methodologies for supporting the activities related to the community's domain of interest. Initially, we concentrated on facilitating the processes of finding, organising, composing and publishing heritage content. Although this was a necessary and significant part of the methodology developed, we also found that supporting the intra-community activities proved to be a major factor in the success of the project. Recognising the roles and responsibilities of the community members, and supporting their individual activities was found to be a crucial aspect of developing the community's online forum. Example of this include ensuring appropriate access to information, reinforcing the behavioural norms of the community and the standards of interaction expected, and facilitating the organisational activities of community life.

Achieving the methodological goals required the development of new software solutions. The technological requirements of the communities were expressed as the technical goals of the project. In the following sections of this report we will present the goals outlined in the project proposal and the solutions produced. Since we will demonstrate our achievements on concrete, fully operational applications, we will present first the results of the application goals.