The CULTURA project aims to create an innovative information and communications technology (ICT) environment in which users with a range of different backgrounds and expertise can collaboratively explore, interrogate and interpret complex and diverse digital cultural heritage collections. At the conclusion of the project, the resulting environment will be a system which has pushed forward the frontiers of technology in the creation of community and content aware interfaces to digital humanities collections.

This paper introduces the main characteristics of the digital cultural collections that constitute the use cases presently in use in the CULTURA environment.

A section on related work follows giving an account on efforts on the management of digital annotations that are pertinent and that have been considered.

Afterwards the innovative annotation features of the CULTURA portal for digital humanities are described; those features are aimed at improving the interaction of non-specialist users and general public with digital cultural heritage content. The annotation functions consist of two modules: the FAST annotation service as back-end and the CAT Web front-end integrated in the CULTURA portal. The annotation features have been, and are being, tested with different types of users and useful feedback is being collated, with the overall aim of generalising the approach to diverse document collections and not only the area of cultural heritage.

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