Introduction

Heritage is our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on to future generations (UNESCO, 2008). Cultural heritage is commonly divided into two categories (Cane and Conagham, 2009):

• 1 Tangible cultural heritage that are material, and can be (a) movable objects, such as paintings, antiquities or artefacts and (b) immovable objects such as buildings, monuments or archaeological sites; and

• 2 Intangible cultural heritage that cannot be touched but which can be felt through other sensory organs – for example, can be seen, as in the case of a dance or performance of a play or ritual, or can be heard, as in the case of music, stories, etc.

A new form of cultural heritage is born when the tangible or intangible heritage objects are digitized; and this is commonly referred to as digital cultural heritage or cultural heritage information resources (Lor and Britz, 2012). Cultural heritage information resources may include a wide variety of content, objects and artefacts. According to the European Commission, Europe's cultural memory includes print (books, journals and newspapers), photographs, museum objects, archival documents, sound and audio visual materials, monuments and archaeological sites (European Commission, 2011).

Cultural heritage in the parlance of the World Intellectual Property Organization may be either intangible, tangible or, most usually, combinations of the two – an example of such a ‘mixed expression of folklore’ would be a woven rug (a tangible expression) that expresses elements of a traditional story (an intangible expression) (WIPO, n.d.).

Cultural heritage content may come in many different forms, such as:

• • verbal expressions, such as folk tales, folk poetry and riddles, signs, words, symbols and indications

• • musical expressions, such as folk songs and instrumental music

• • expressions by actions, such as folk dances, plays and artistic forms or rituals, whether or not reduced to a material form

• • tangible expressions, such as:

• — productions of folk art, in particular, drawings, paintings, carvings, sculptures, pottery, terracotta, mosaic, woodwork, metalware, jewellery, basket weaving, needlework, textiles, carpets, costumes

• — crafts

• — musical instruments

• — architectural forms.

A number of publications covering different aspects of digital cultural heritage have appeared over the past decade or so (Cameron and Kenderdine, 2007; Cane and Conagham, 2009; Feather, 2006; Lor and Britz, 2012), and they cover a wide range of themes such as: