With the rapid increase in the number of metadata-enabled cultural repositories, the need for systems that can display larger, content-rich sets of results has grown correspondingly. At the same time, the ability to access objects from repositories in multiple cultural domains suggests an opportunity for innovative approaches to the visualization of search results drawing on heterogeneous conceptual frameworks, metadata structures, naming devices and end-user requirements. We describe the development and testing of a two-tier semantic mediating device to support searches of multiple cross-cultural metadata-enabled repositories. Seventeen common categories provide a semantic bridge linking different content metadata schemes, while a topic map-enabled search interface facilitates the access of digital objects in diverse repositories.
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