D. C. Papadopoulos1, E. C. Mavrikas2
1Cultural Heritage Management Laboratory, Dept. of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Greece
2. Cultural Informatics Laboratory (CI-Lab), Dept. of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Greece

As acknowledged by most scholars, practitioners and heritage institutions, the digital resources of documented Cultural Heritage form a broad corpus of diverse attributes relating to content, representation and target audiences. Until recently, Web publishing of such resources has been inconsistent in addressing these attributes, by lacking formal structure, coherence, information discovery and retrieval mechanisms, and support for custom points-of-view (individualized, thematic, spatiotemporal, multilingual, multicultural) and collaborative work. Peer-to-peer computing encourages a distributed architecture which could amend such inefficiencies.
This paper explores the emergence of peer-to-peer content networking and the ways in which it meets the requirements arising from specific aspects of the Cultural Heritage field: to encourage exploration and collaboration by identifying universal themes; to maintain contextual information; to provide the interpretation necessary to tell a story; to authenticate knowledge; to seamlessly document and record in a variety of media; to police intellectual property rights.
Key words: Cultural Heritage, Peer-to-Peer, Distributed Content, Knowledge Management, Collaboration Technologies