A metadata enriched system for the documentation of multi-modal digital imaging surveys

In the field of Digital Heritage Studies, data provenance has always been an open and challenging issue. As Cultural Heritage objects are unique by definition, the methods, the practices and the strategies to build digital documentation are not homogeneous, universal or standardized. Metadata is a minimalistic yet powerful form to source and describe a digital document. They are often required or mandatory at an advanced stage of a Digital Heritage project. Our approach is to integrate since data capture steps meaningful information to document a Digital Heritage asset as it is moreover being composed nowadays from multiple sources or multimodal imaging surveys. This article exposes the methodological and technical aspects related to the ongoing development of MEMoS; standing for Metadata Enriched Multimodal documentation System. MEMoS aims to contribute to data provenance issues in current multimodal imaging surveys. It explores a way to document CH oriented capture data sets with a versatile descriptive metadata scheme inspired from the W7 ontological model. In addition, an experiment illustrated by several case studies, explores the possibility to integrate those metadata encoded into 2D barcodes directly to the captured image set. The article lays the foundation of a three parted methodology namely describe - encode and display toward metadata enriched documentation of CH objects.