BIG DATA MINING, ONTOLOGY DESIGN, SEMANTIC INTEROPERABILITY, EXOTIC DRUG TRAJECTORIES, CULTURAL HERITAGE. THE PROJECT aims to develop a context-aware search engine which will serve two purposes: 1) It fosters the research capacities of scholars in the field of digital humanities, and 2) can profitably be exploited by the creative industry and other stakeholders. By using spatiotemporal metadata gathered in TIME CAPSULEs semantic interoperable ontology, for the first time long-term developments and transformations can be analyzed in big data collections, both diachronically and synchronically. TIME CAPSULE will gather data from ten disparate cultural heritage databases into a single, autonomous database from which data can be retrieved in a unified manner. This will enable us to aggregate a variety of dissimilar but contextually related digital heritage items in an accessible way. TIME CAPSULE uses innovative computational and information methodology to build the semantic interoperable ontology with a multimedia search engine using geographical and temporal metadata. The resulting birds eye view of a wide range of structured and related heritage data will provide new insights and raise interdisciplinary research questions, that are useful within the context of current and future efforts to build digital national thesaurus resources as part of a cultural commonwealth. Data sets relating to the early modern history of medicinal plants in the Low Countries (i.e. 1550-1850) will be used as proof of concept. The research on semantic interoperability and historical research of therapeutic drugs will come together in TIME CAPSULE, in order to generate new perspectives on the circulation of botanical and medico-pharmaceutical knowledge in the early modern world.