The Archival Photograph and Its Meaning: Formalisms for Modeling Images

Abstract

This article explores ontological principles and their potential applications in the formal description of archival photographs. Current archival descriptive practices are reviewed and the larger question is addressed: do archivists who are engaged in describing photographs need a more formalized system of representation, or do existing encoding schemes and description standards provide enough foundation and structure? The emerging semantic Web 3.0 environment presents new challenges. Ontology, formalizations, semantic annotations, and effective machine processing are of immediate and practical importance. To begin exploring these concepts within the context of archival description, a new semantic archives model is proposed.

Construction and Applications of Ontology: Recent Trends

“…Benson 30 explored potential of ontological principles in the formal description of archival photographs. This exploration was for knowing whether the photograph archivists need more formalised system of representation or existing schemes are satisfactory.…”

Application of Linked Open Data to the coding and dissemination of Spanish Civil War photographic archives

“…Description of the images in library and archive query systems has been based on textual representation of the content. Many descriptive methods applied to photographic archives in these types of systems, such as library and archive cataloging standards, have not sufficiently considered the peculiarities of photography, as they were not intended for this type of media (Benson, 2009). To this we can add lack of uniformity and differences of opinion regarding coding forms, standardization of terminology, and query and navigation interfaces.…”

Archival users and AI tools for reference and access: a study within the InterPARES Trust AI project

“…Infine, InterPARES 4 (2012-2019) 4 ha affrontato l'autenticità e affidabilità di record e dati in ambienti on-line, definendo i quadri teorici e metodologici utili per sviluppare politiche, procedure, regolamenti, standard e legislazioni locali, nazionali e internazionali. Supportare il lavoro archivistico utilizzando l'IA non è un'idea nuova: da molto si discetta di archivista cibernetico (Rhoads 1969) e di Artificial Intelligence, Expert Systems, and Archival Automation (Hirtle 1987); Stielow paragonò lo sviluppo della teoria archivistica all'avanguardia dell'IA, caratterizzando entrambi come la ricerca dell'ovvio (Stielow 1991), mentre Benson adottò soluzioni di intelligenza artificiale per rappresentare le fotografie d'archivio (Benson 2009). Eppure, stando a una ricerca di Cohasset Associates e ARMA International, nel 2019 solo il 44% degli archivisti testimoniava che le proprie organizzazioni utilizzano "strumenti automatizzati [...] per individuare e conservare le informazioni rilevanti", il 49% eliminava manualmente le e-mail, mentre il 58% eliminava manualmente i record dai dispositivi mobili (Cohasset e ARMA 2019).…”