Heritage Portals are in this dissertation defined as deep portals which can give access to external resource contents. This dissertation has developed such a portal which accesses the Swedish SMR, FMIS and the ARK system developed by L – P : Archaeology through web services.

The development of the web Service for the ARK system was done as a part of this project combined with the creating of a WFS web-mapping service serving the spatial part of the dataset collected as a part of the Sintana project. The textual part of this dataset has been incorporated into an ARK system in the same way that the Portus project dataset was. Both these projects are available through the ARK web service.

The portal accessed the FMIS and ARK web service and re-maps the XML output to Midas standard formatted XML and combined them. This allows the portal to do a cross-search of the two datasets and return the data as one combined Midas formatted XML file. On the dissertation web-site it is also possible to view all the data output as HTML styles according to the web-site design.

Finally the dissertation reviews the theory and history behind data interoperability in Europe and discusses issues like data sharing, interoperability solutions, language and standards. Other interoperability solutions like ARENA, HEIRPORT, FMIS and Heritage Gateway are presented and their solutions compared against the ones chosen for this project.