Describing and Searching Food Content in Historical Images with the ChIA Vocabulary

Through digitization, cultural and historical images (paintings, drawings, photographs, etc.) are transformed from tangible to digital intangible resources and can be made accessible through different platforms. This significantly increases their availability to the general public. However, the transformation mainly focuses on converting the images into their digital representations with generic metadata (e.g. title, creator, date, genre, etc.). The content of the image is often outlined in short descriptions or keywords, but is usually insufficient to support a comprehensive content search. Hence, the ChIA project set out to investigate the integration of semantic technologies and image analysis to improve the retrieval of cultural images related to food. Part of ChIA's goal was to develop a vocabulary of food terms that is particularly attuned to historical and cultural images depicting food. Regarding 'food' as a fairly broad concept, ChIA focused specifically on food that is edible to humans and images that represent it in a cultural setting, which typically includes people, places, objects or a combination of these. Existing thesauri were evaluated and finally reused in the open ChIA vocabulary for image description. The final ChIA food vocabulary has been published online using Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) format and is available for reuse in cataloguing via web services. The use of the ChIA vocabulary is intended to improve the retrieval and linking of cultural images depicting food-related themes. Moreover, the ChIA food concepts and ontology may serve as input for computer vision concepts and automated data enrichment.