I am involved with a cultural heritage project that maintains the
archives (actually, "life and times") of the most famous brazilian
painter, Candido Portinari (http://www.portinari.org.br).
The project has extensive multimedia data in traditional relational
dbs, besides the complete documentation (including systematic natural
language description) of the artworks themselves. It includes things
like photographs, recordings, newpaper clippings, books, interview
recordings, video, etc...
I have now convinced them that they should make their data available on
the semantic web, via Open Linked Data. The first step, of course, is
selecting the suitable ontologies to map their db schema onto them,
extending if/when needed. So the question is, can you give me pointers
to any ontologies (in RDF(S)/OWL) used in the e-culture or similar
projects? Unfortunately, at this stage the project cannot afford to pay
for proprietary ontologies (such as the Getty Museum's), so they must
be free...