Ubiquitous Access to Digital Cultural Heritage

Abstract

The digitization initiatives in the past decades have led to a tremendous increase in digitized objects in the cultural heritage domain. Although digitally available, these objects are often not easily accessible for interested users because of the distributed allocation of the content in different repositories and the variety in data structure and standards. When users search for cultural content, they first need to identify the specific repository and then need to know how to search within this platform (e.g., usage of specific vocabulary). The goal of the EEXCESS project is to design and implement an infrastructure that enables ubiquitous access to digital cultural heritage content. Cultural content should be made available in the channels that users habitually visit and be tailored to their current context without the need to manually search multiple portals or content repositories. To realize this goal, open-source software components and services have been developed that can either be used as an integrated infrastructure or as modular components suitable to be integrated in other products and services. The EEXCESS modules and components comprise (i) Web-based context detection, (ii) information retrieval-based, federated content aggregation, (iii) metadata definition and mapping, and (iv) a component responsible for privacy preservation. Various applications have been realized based on these components that bring cultural content to the user in content consumption and content creation scenarios. For example, content consumption is realized by a browser extension generating automatic search queries from the current page context and the focus paragraph and presenting related results aggregated from different data providers. A Google Docs add-on allows retrieval of relevant content aggregated from multiple data providers while collaboratively writing a document. These relevant resources then can be included in the current document either as citation, an image, or a link (with preview) without having to leave disrupt the current writing task for an explicit search in various content providers’ portals.

Cultural heritage preservation by using blockchain technologies

“…But the proposed solution in this paper preserves all the properties that have made blockchains so attractive, it is an open platform with the right balance of cryptography, addressing energy issues, post-quantum computing issues, IoT readiness, and related important business issues inked to tourism. It is also worth adding that the presented solution is in line with the recent incentives to enable ubiquitous access to digital heritage [42] by providing digital infrastructures for cultural heritage [43].…”

QueryCrumbs: A Compact Visualization for Navigating the Search Query History

“…While more marks can be added, we estimate 2 search sessions as lower bound for a useful query navigation support and as a good trade-off between usefulness and support for limited screen-size. QueryCrumbs have been integrated as a visual history tool into a browser plugin for contextualized access to cultural heritage content 3 [40].…”

Immersive Visualization and Curation of Archaeological Heritage Data: Çatalhöyük and the Dig@IT App

“…The digital method proposed in this article aims to define new interactive ways to document, visualize, and curate searchable archaeological data using immersive virtual environments connected to a remote Structured Query Language (SQL) database server. To design and develop such a method, our work builds upon influential contributions that focus on ontologies for cultural objects (Kakali et al 2007;Havemann et al 2009;Hyvönen 2009;Niccolucci, Hermon, and Doerr 2015), networked methods for cultural data archives and dissemination (Power et al 2017;Seifert et al 2017), visualization and annotation of 3D architectural and archaeological models in real-time (Poyart et al 2011;Snyder 2014), and user interfaces for the digital publication of archaeological excavations (R. Opitz and Johnson 2016).…”