World Heritage Memory Net instance of website
History
Directed by Ching-chih Chen of the US nonprofit and tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, Global Connection and Collaboration, Inc., and supported until August 2010 by the NSF/International Digital Library Program (IDLP) as a part of her Global Memory Net, WHMNet is the result of a multi-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in November 2006 between the World Heritage Centre and Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts, USA under the leadership of Chen, who was then information technology Professor at Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science.  The WHMNet project, which began in July 2007, benefits greatly from Chen's GMNet, an online global image library and gateway to cultural, historical, and heritage images around the world, created with a multi-year grant from the International Digital Library Programme of the US National Science Foundation (NSF). WHMNet leverages GMNet's innovative integrated multimedia content retrieval system (i-M-C-S) with further system development.  Chen became Professor Emeritus of Simmons College in June, 2010 and NSF grant ended in August 2010.  Since September 2010 to the present, WHMNet has been supported by GlobalCC until its completion.
The goal is to bring an immersive, seamless, multimedia experience in a multilingual website to citizens, researchers, scholars and students of the world. The former World Heritage Centre Director and current UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture, Francesco Bandarin, has stated that the project offers "great potential to enhance the humanities for universal access and enrichment through the use of emerging technologies." It exposes the world's cultural, natural, and mixed wonders as well as educates global citizens to the dangers of losing these properties through war and environmental factors. It also serves to better promote intercultural understanding during this troubled time.Collections
WHMNet is a fast, efficient, cutting-edge, online knowledge base which provides universal access to multilingual, multimedia and multiformat resources from museums, archives, libraries, and world bibliographic and Web resources, and includes photographs, videos, 360° Panophotographies, audio clips, and documents. Currently the WHMNet Collection has more than 40,000 images, 27 video tours, many more video documentaries from available sources, and access to more than 250 360° Panophotographies courtesy of Tito Dupret of patrimonium-mundi.org.  Detailed descriptive information is presented in multilingual format in at least 6 UNESCO official languages (Arabic Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish) and in many additional languages when available.  In total, 103 world languages are represented.
Multilingual multimedia collections of the 936 UNESCO World Heritage Sites are accessible by:
type of example of manifestation of representation of