The BRICKS infrastructure-an overview

Access to Archives of …, 2009

Recently, cultural temples in Flanders had little strategy to archive and disseminate their productions. Yet, the local government wants the productions to be archived as cultural heritage, schools want material bundles for educational purposes, and other (foreign) institutions want production clips for promotional or research aims. The research project PokuMOn [1], deals with these problems and requirements of online distribution and archiving of multimedia of performing arts and (classical) music. In this article, we tackle the following issues: i) the institutions want an easy to use, robust, de-central archive; ii) the institutions want to bundle and exchange their assets; iii) the institutions want to use a common metadata schema combined with their own schemas; and iv) the institutions want their (meta)data enriched and interlinked.

HighTech and Innovation Journal

Within the field of Digital Humanities, a great effort has been made to digitize documents and collections in order to build catalogs and exhibitions on the Web. In this paper, we present WeME, a Web application for building a knowledge base, which can be used to describe digital documents. WeME can be used by different categories of users: archivists/librarians and scholars. WeME extracts information from some well-known Linked Data nodes, i.e. DBpedia and GeoNames, as well as traditional Web sources, i.e. VIAF. As a use case of WeME, we describe the knowledge base related to the Christopher Clavius’s corre spondence. Clavius was a mathematician and an astronomer of the XVI Century. He wrote more than 300 letters, most of which are owned by the Historical Archives of the Pontifical Gregorian University (APUG) in Rome. The built knowledge base contains 139 links to DBpedia, 83 links to GeoNames and 129 links to VIAF. In order to test the usability of WeME, we invited 26 users to tes...

Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing

The exponential growth of data has made ontology modeling an up-and-coming research area for knowledge representation. One of the domains of interest is represented by Cultural Heritage, in which modeling of environments, such as archaeological parks, could lead to their protection and enhancement. In this scenario, the valuable dataset on the Naples Urban Archaeological Park (PAUN) is of particular interest. Due to its peculiarity, the database could benefit from innovative techniques for retrieving the information, representing a large part of the information contained within the DatabencArt platform, which collects data on Campania's cultural heritage. This paper aims to introduce an ontology-based approach to improve data retrieval, which could help expert users in the field (archaeologists, art historians, geologists, etc.). Scholars need to be able to easily compare the information. To this end, a semantic search is able to transform a vast amount of data into linked conce...

Big data and cognitive computing, 2020

Advancements in cultural informatics have significantly influenced the way we perceive, analyze, communicate and understand culture. New data sources, such as social media, digitized cultural content, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, have allowed us to enrich and customize the cultural experience, but at the same time have created an avalanche of new data that needs to be stored and appropriately managed in order to be of value. Although data management plays a central role in driving forward the cultural heritage domain, the solutions applied so far are fragmented, physically distributed, require specialized IT knowledge to deploy, and entail significant IT experience to operate even for trivial tasks. In this work, we present Hydria, an online data lake that allows users without any IT background to harvest, store, organize, analyze and share heterogeneous, multi-faceted cultural heritage data. Hydria provides a zero-administration, zero-cost, integrated framework that enables researchers, museum curators and other stakeholders within the cultural heritage domain to easily (i) deploy data acquisition services (like social media scrapers, focused web crawlers, dataset imports, questionnaire forms), (ii) design and manage versatile customizable data stores, (iii) share whole datasets or horizontal/vertical data shards with other stakeholders, (iv) search, filter and analyze data via an expressive yet simple-to-use graphical query engine and visualization tools, and (v) perform user management and access control operations on the stored data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution in the literature that focuses on collecting, managing, analyzing, and sharing diverse, multi-faceted data in the cultural heritage domain and targets users without an IT background.

1995

The availability of sophisticated network environments offers the possibility of implementing distributed hypermedia. The peculiarities of the cultural heritage data raise some challenging difficulties. The paper discusses some of these problems and the related solutions. Finally, it describes a project of a distributed hypermedia on the archaeological heritage in Tuscany, illustrating the first available results and the general system architecture.

2007

This paper addresses the prototypical problem of a cultural heritage institution with the ambition to disclose all of its content in a single, unified system. Like other enterprises, these institutions have heterogeneous collections distributed over multiple legacy systems. Our approach is to turn the metadata retrieval problem into a free-text retrieval problem by an unconditional merging of the heterogeneous sub-collections and flattening of all metadata structures. We investigate the viability of the approach by an extensive case study of a large museum. Our main findings are as follows: First, by converting all digital content to text, and indexing it with a standard IR system, we can effectively build a unified system providing access to all data. Second, an initial empirical evaluation shows superior performance in comparison with the legacy systems currently in use by the institute. Therefore, our third and overall finding is that our approach is a viable option to give access to heterogeneous collections.

International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 2013

The European amount of digitized material is growing very rapidly, as national, regional and European programmes support the digitization processes by museums, libraries, archives, archaeological sites, and audiovisual repositories. The generation of digital cultural heritage is accelerated also by the impulse of Europeana that is fostering the European cultural institutions to produce even more digital content. Moreover digital cultural heritage content are complex and interlinked through many relations. European countries are working for the future, in order to create a data infrastructure devoted to cultural heritage research. Currently, Europe have twin projects (DC-NET and INDICATE) ongoing and a new international coordination action is under preparation to design a validated roadmap for the preservation of digital cultural content. These initiatives are contributing to smooth the way to the Open Science Infrastructure for Digital Cultural Heritage, which is foreseen in 2020.

Our research work deals with the integration of information sources coming from Cultural Heritage (CH) institutions (such as archives, libraries and museums). In order to promote semantic interoperability in CH resources, we propose: a) an ontology-based integration architecture based on the use of CIDOC CRM ontology, b) mappings from various CH metadata schemas to the ontology, and c) metadata query transformation to queries on the ontology.

2006

In this paper we describe the practical implications of semantically exposing a collection management system (EROS [1][2][3][4]) for large cultural heritage multimedia repositories. This is achieved through a Search and Retrieve Web Service (SRW[5]) that maps the EROS metadata schema to the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model[6], a core ontology for describing the semantics of schema and data structure elements in cultural heritage documentation. The mSpace([18]) framework, an interaction model to help people access and explore information, has been integrated with the SRW to provide powerful navigation facilities on the rich multimedia collections served by EROS. We also present some of the lessons learnt whilst adapting the technologies to the EROS system and offer some insight into the performance issues with a system of this size.

Proceedings of the 2008 …, 2008