Customizable Retrieval Functions Based on User Tasks in the Cultural Heritage Domain

The cultural heritage domain dealing with digital surrogates of rare and fragile historic artifacts is one of the most promising areas for establishing collaboratories, i.e. shared virtual working environments for groups of users. However, in order to be considered a useful tool, such a system must reflect and support the specific tasks which are typical for the domain. The system design presented here takes into account a variety of activities, e.g., source analysis, which are supported by a task-specific selection of appropriate retrieval functions, e.g., access to OCR results and annotations. The tasks are explicitly modeled, thus the corresponding user interfaces can be automatically generated.