Integrating, Indexing and Querying the Tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage Available Online: The QueryLab Portal

Abstract

Cultural heritage inventories have been created to collect and preserve the culture and to allow the participation of stakeholders and communities, promoting and disseminating their knowledges. There are two types of inventories: those who give data access via web services or open data, and others which are closed to external access and can be visited only through dedicated web sites, generating data silo problems. The integration of data harvested from different archives enables to compare the cultures and traditions of places from opposite sides of the world, showing how people have more in common than expected. The purpose of the developed portal is to provide query tools managing the web services provided by cultural heritage databases in a transparent way, allowing the user to make a single query and obtain results from all inventories considered at the same time. Moreover, with the introduction of the ICH-Light model, specifically studied for the mapping of intangible heritage, data from inventories of this domain can also be harvested, indexed and integrated into the portal, allowing the creation of an environment dedicated to intangible data where traditions, knowledges, rituals and festive events can be found and searched all together.

Development of Data Labelling and Visualization Technologies for Cultural Heritage Intelligent Curation

“…According to the most recent study, cultural heritage inventories are created to collect and preserve culture, allow stakeholder and community engagement, and promote and disseminate knowledge [5]. However, the existing problem is that the inventories that grant data access through web services or open data, and the inventories that are blocked from external access and can only be visited through a dedicated website, are not integrated.…”

“…In addition, the introduction of the studied ICH-Light model for intangible cultural heritage mapping makes it possible to collect, index, and integrate inventory data into a portal. This effort has allowed the creation of an environment dedicated to intangible data and also made it possible to search for traditions, knowledge, ceremonies, and festive events [5].…”

Storytelling and Gaming Tools for Easy Immersive Fruition of Intangible Heritage

“…Used data are those related to intangible heritage and come from the QueryLab's IntangibleHeritage archive, created by collecting and indexing data from different intangible archives in the world. The data are gathered using a specific model, as described in (Artese & Gagliardi, 2022), called the ICH-Light Model, capable of storing and providing the minimum information needed to describe intangible assets and retrieve them from the original resources.…”

Unsupervised Creation of Semantic Graphs to Navigate Intangible Cultural Heritage Using Transformers

“…The pipeline has been tested using data from the QueryLab portal, a framework for the management of tangible and intangible cultural heritage (Artese & Gagliardi, 2022).…”