Digital Resource Semantic Management of Islamic Buildings Case Study on Isfahan Islamic Architecture Digital Collection

Abstract

This article describes an innovative way to facilitate and to provide a collaborative semantic management of digital resources of Islamic historical buildings. The approach combines a topic maps-based semantic support to the 5W1H model (Where, Who, When, What, Who and How) with objective of enabling comprehensive semantics of digital contents for research and education purposes. The topic mapsbased semantic support enables to reduce the problems of semantic gaps among different communities (cultural, linguistic ambiguities among various types of multi-disciplinary experts). Furthermore, a multi-faceted resource category management, applied to metadata sets and related semantic features, allows metadata optimization of the description of the cultural resources. This innovative approach has been used to build the Isfahan Islamic Architecture Database (IIAD) Collection as a case study. The research demonstrates that a topic mapsbased semantic model applied to collaborative metadata management paradigms can be easily exploited as a tool to enhance traditional architectural and cross-disciplinary studies.