“Synthesis_museum” is a cultural information system for collections management. The system has a generic and flexible enough documentation process model, the user interface environment is provided through the internet and it is specially adapted for describing the knowledge for cultural instances for administration and scientific use by curators and administrative staff of a cultural institution. Synthesis is a multilingual system. It supports the documentation in Greek, English, French, Italian and Arabic. It further supports data exchange with other systems in xml format. The data model of “synthesis” is fully compatible with ISO 21127 and includes the appropriate functional information units for administrative and scientific documentation of museum objects.

The system supports a generic process model for documentation which can be adapted according to the administrational requirements of a cultural institution. The process model supports, four types of users, “administrator”, “documentation administrator”, “editor” and “reader”. According to their type, the system allows the users of one or more organizations to create, process, publish, un-publish, and translate documents of a cultural object or a monument. The system exploits XML technology, multi layered architectures, open source software, and international standards.

The system supports the documentation for Museum objects Collections Multimedia objects (photos, designs, studies etc) Bibliography Evidences Persons Organizations Departments Places Materials *Events

The system supports the process control for the following documentation procedures: The creation of a new unpublished document The editing of an unpublished document The notification for publishing of an unpublished document The rejection of publication of an unpublished document The publishing of an unpublished document The un-publishing of a published document The viewing of a published or unpublished document The deletion of an unpublished document The creation of a new edition of an existing document The translation of an existing published or unpublished document

It supports the following user types: System administrator Documentation administrator Editor Reader

The system “synthesismuseum” is a web application and uses 3 tier architecture. It can be distributed to different machines, in the same or different physical places, ensuring the open architecture, expandability, adaptability and flexibility.
The general idea is that the data is stored in xml documents in a central database and the users through the internet can use the functions of the system analogously to their type and permissions they have.

Synthesis provides the functions to the users for Create and edit documents Navigate and retrieve documents Data migration
Documentation of cultural instances to more than one language *Associate cultural instances and events.