CultIS (https://cultis.math.bas.bg/en) is a web-based open-source platform for intelligent management of digital content, conceived as an integrated data storage, retrieval, and curation for culture, humanities and social sciences research. CultIS implements a modular, service-oriented architecture that supports heterogeneous digital cultural assets through a unified data model. It provides advanced mechanisms for persistent and sustainable storage, dynamic management of structured metadata, and semantic organization of digital objects and collections.

The platform is developed by the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences as an infrastructure component of CLaDA-BG, the Bulgarian National Interdisciplinary Research e-Infrastructure for Resources and Technologies in favour of the Bulgarian Language and Cultural Heritage, part of the EU infrastructures CLARIN and DARIAH (2018-2027). The mission of CLaDA-BG is to create a national infrastructure for resources and technologies for linguistic and cultural heritage.

The platform provides a set of functionalities for interactive virtual presentation, multidimensional and full-text search, filtering, cross-sectional dynamic grouping, and hierarchical and multilayer content indexing based on controlled vocabularies and dictionary-driven classification schemes. CultIS supports the ingestion, management, and long-term preservation of diverse digitized cultural heritage resources (incl. textual, graphical, audiovisual, three-dimensional, and other complex media objects) together with their associated descriptive, structural, and administrative metadata.

The innovative strategy of CultIS is focused on achieving a high degree of configurability, extensibility, and inclusiveness of the technological solutions through sustainable development. The platform allows building of multilingual and application-specific user interfaces and visualizations, as well as the integration of additional functional modules according to domain and users’ requirements. The interoperability is supported through adoptable interfaces to different external systems using standard formats. CultIS is implemented using established and open-source software technologies, ensuring scalability, maintainability, and adaptability to evolving research and application contexts.

The platform has been deployed or is in the process of being deployed in a number of Bulgarian cultural and national institutions. CultIS serves three of the largest libraries in Bulgaria (Public Library “Ivan Vazov” – Plovdiv, Sofia University Library, Central Library of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences), providing open access to over 200,000 digital cultural objects. The wide range of applications with significant social impact of CultIS is confirmed by the implementation and maintenance of digital archives for state institutions such as the National Statistical Institute of the Republic of Bulgaria, the Supreme Court of Cassation, etc.