The Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) and the VISTA Centre at University of Birmingham have recently developed a bespoke bilingual and fully integrated Cultural Heritage Management Application in Access database and ArcGIS. The new customized application uses Open Source code. The MIDAS Heritage data standard – developed and expanded by FISH in 2008 – was reviewed as part of the development process.

It is hoped this cultural resource management tool will be used by other Historic Environment Records in the Middle East in the near future.

The two main components of the QNHER system are the user interface and the server APIs. The user interface is an HTML5 client application which runs in a web browser over the Internet. It communicates with the server via a set of open APIs. The server APIs are exposed via a Proxy Server and all traffic between the Internet and the server is encrypted using HTTPS.

For more information, please read this seminar paper about the project (published 2010) or contact Richard Cuttler, Senior Project Manager, IBM VISTA, Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham: rcuttler@bham.ac.uk