This work combines semantic reasoning and machine learning to create tools that allow curators of the visual art collections to identify and correct the annotations of the artwork as well as to improve the relevance of the content-based search results in these collections. The research is based on the Joconde database maintained by French Ministry of Culture that contains illustrated artwork records from main French public and private museums representing archeological objects, decorative arts, fine arts, historical and scientific documents, etc. The Joconde database includes semantic metadata that describes properties of the artworks and their content. The developed methods create a data pipeline that processes metadata, trains a Convolutional Neural Network image classification model, makes prediction for the entire collection and expands the metadata to be the base for the SPARQL search queries. We developed a set of such queries to identify noise and silence in the human annotations and to search image content with results ranked according to the relevance of the objects quantified by the prediction score provided by the deep learning model. We also developed methods to discover new contextual relationships between the concepts in the metadata by analyzing the contrast between the concepts similarities in the Joconde's semantic model and other vocabularies and we tried to improve the model prediction scores based on the semantic relations. Our results show that cross-fertilization between symbolic AI and machine learning can indeed provide the tools to address the challenges of the museum curators work describing the artwork pieces and searching for the relevant images.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.