Semantic Web technologies for multimedia museum information handling

This paper describes the design and prototype implementation of a novel architecture for integrated concept, metadata and content based browsing and retrieval of museum information. The work is part of a European project involving several major galleries and the aim is to provide more versatile access to digital collections of museum artefacts, including 2-D images, 3-D models and other multimedia representations. An ontology for the museum domain, based on the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, is being developed as a semantic layer with references to the digital collection as instance information. The challenges of dealing with the import and management of multimedia museum information through the CIDOC CRM based semantic layer include data aggregation/derivation, cleaning, mapping and augmentation. Knowledge engineering precepts are used to guide the development of tools for data mapping and the organisation of workshops to enhance the museum partners' understanding of the ontology in relation to their legacy data. Augmentation agents for automatically extracting missing metadata instances from the Web are being developed as a way of assisting users to populate the semantic layer. Natural language processing techniques coupled with information retrieval tools are used for identifying information sources and structuring them into welldefined formats to be entered in the ontology. An ontological approach is also taken to the design and implementation of the user-interface of which a graphical concept browser is an integral component. This allows navigation through the semantic layer, display of thumbnails, or full representations of artefacts and textual information in appropriate viewers and the invocation of conventional content based searching or combined querying. Semantic Web technologies are used in system integration to describe how tools for analysis and visualisation can be applied to different data types and sources. This supports flexible and managed formulation, execution and interpretation of the results of distributed multimedia queries. Searches integrating concepts, content and metadata can be initiated from a single user interface. Combining system and data ontologies to define and publish the semantics of data retrieval brings closer the semantic web ideal of a self-describing digital heritage archive, accessible to anyone who can read these published semantics. 2 A. StevensonP1P, M. AddisP1P, M. BonifaceP1P, S. GoodallP2P, P. GrimwoodP1P, S. KimP2P, P. LewisP2P, K. MartinezP2P,

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