AN APPROACH TO PRESERVE CULTURAL HERITAGE INFORMATION by LEONG Hio Lam Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Jingzhi GUO Master of Science in E-Commerce Technology There are diverse ways of recording cultural heritage information, which results in records in different formats and sources. The objective of the study is to research on a way to link all these sources together to form a knowledge base. It had been suggested that the creation of a semantic network is a better alternative to keyword-based searchable information system, as it offers higher interactivity and more knowledge sharing functions. The thesis study explores the implementation of a heritage information system by first specifying the necessary subsystems and their roles in the proposed system, then getting into details for the core subsystems. A prototype system is then developed to demonstrate the possible user interface design and interactions. The prototype system is a realization of the registration system, with data stored in XML files and association relationships stored in relational database. The thesis study can be referred to as a requirement analysis of the potential heritage information system, which outlined the key use cases and system flows, as well as the definition of core objects in the system. Future work can focus on the interoperability of the XML data store and the relational database, and further into the core indexing system and operates on top of the data store. The goal of the development will be the implementation of a digital library to access all types of information, relationships, digital and digitized records, etc, with public contributions enabled. This can eventually be built as a knowledge network that can be shared across cultural and geographical boundaries.