Dédalo in plain language

This section is for curators, archivists, researchers, directors and anyone deciding whether Dédalo fits their institution. It explains what the system is and how it behaves, without asking you to read a line of code.

The rest of the manual is written for people building or operating Dédalo. Everything here links into it, so you can go deeper wherever you want to.

Dédalo is a Free and Open Source system for managing cultural heritage: archives, inventories, catalogues and censuses — archaeology, ethnology, oral memory, numismatics, art, museums. It is not a website builder and not a generic content manager. It exists to help an institution produce good data, keep it for decades, and publish the part of it that should be public.

Four pictures and one text are enough to understand the whole shape of it.

The four pictures

Where everything lives — the two separate places Dédalo runs in, and why only one of them faces the internet.
The journey of one record — from the moment somebody catalogues something to the moment a visitor finds it.
Three doors into the same collection — what an "API" is, which ones Dédalo has, and who is allowed through each.
Ready for AI — on your terms — what semantic search and AI assistants actually do here, and what they are structurally unable to do.

Each page carries a full-size diagram you can open, project or print.

The ideas

The ideas behind Dédalo — the concepts a curator or a humanities researcher needs: records and sections, the active ontology, controlled vocabularies, links instead of copies, languages, versions, permissions and publication. With a short table translating the words developers use into the words you already use.

If you only remember three things

The short version

Your catalogue is private and it is the original. What the public sees is a copy, on a different machine, that can only be read.
The shape of the catalogue is yours to change. Fields, record types and vocabularies are data you edit inside Dédalo — not code somebody has to rewrite for you.
Nothing is published or changed silently. Publication is a decision taken record by record, and every edit ever made is kept, with its author and its date.

Where to go next

Ready to see the vocabulary the rest of the manual uses? The Glossary defines every term, and the core hub is the technical starting point.
Deciding on infrastructure? Installation opens with server sizing and the three ways to install.
Curious about the day-to-day tools? The tools user guide covers them one by one.