Using an ontology and a multilingual glossary for enhancing the nautical archaeology digital library

Abstract

Access to materials in digital collections has been extensively studied within digital libraries. Exploring a collection requires customized indices and novel interfaces to allow users new exploration mechanisms. Materials or objects can then be found by way of full-text, faceted, or thematic indexes. There has been a marked interest not only in finding objects in a collection, but in discovering relationships and properties. For example, multiple representations of the same object enable the use of visual aids to augment collection exploration. Depending on the domain and characteristics of the objects in a collection, relationships among components can be used to enrich the process of understanding their contents. In this context, the Nautical Archaeology Digital Library (NADL) includes multilingual textual-and visual-rich objects (shipbuilding treatises, illustrations, photographs, and drawings). In this paper we describe an approach for enhancing access to a collection of ancient technical documents, illustrations, and photographs documenting archaeological excavations. Because of the nature of our collection, we exploit a multilingual glossary along with an ontology. Preliminary tests of our prototype suggest the feasibility of our method for enhancing access to the collection.

DECHO—a framework for the digital exploration of cultural heritage objects

“…In order to tackle this problem, in Payette et al [2002] the authors adopt a mediation mechanism for mapping, translating and aggregating distributed data into complex objects by means of web services. In Monroy et al [2010] the authors propose to use an ontology and a multilingual glossary for enhancing the contents of a digital library by showing relationships among terms, definitions, and translations in context with the original sources and thus helping to better understand the contents of the collection. A major shortcoming of these approaches is that they do not support high-level presentation of information using notions such as the conceptual ontology that we use in order to describe the different cultural aspects characterizing a given information domain.…”

“…These large efforts focus on the gathering of the information and on passively providing a wide range of source materials to as large an audience as possible. Other efforts have focused, for example, on improving access to archaeology libraries by using multilingual glossaries and ontologies (e.g., [Monroy et al 2010]), on integrating and handling highly heterogeneous data (e.g., [Ravindranathan et al 2004]), and on using virtual reality techniques to present archaeology data (e.g., Vote et al [2000]). …”

A Semantic e-Science Platform for 20th Century Paint Conservation

“…Below are described significant related research efforts that have leveraged Semantic Web technologies to integrate data across museums and art galleries (Aliaga et al, 2011, Binding, 2010, Binding et al, 2008, Hyvönen et al, 2006, Mellon, 2009, Monroy et al, 2010, Toledo et al, 2009, Tudhope et al, 2011, Vlachidis, 2012, Vlachidis et al, 2013. The examples discussed in this section represent the most significant or innovative projects: Following the ConservationSpace efforts, the conceptual model, and the technical framework were implemented within the ResearchSpace project (Alexiev et al, Oldman, 2010, Oldman et al, 2014.…”

“…The tools developed within the AMA project are aimed at providing the semi-automated mapping and integration of cultural heritage custom data to the CIDOC-CRM. It also aims to provide a semantic framework to store, manage and browse the encoded information via user-friendly interfaces (Eide et al, 2008, Hernández et al, 2008, Monroy et al, 2010. Place, Material, and Document) in each given domain.…”

“…This section provides an overview of significant related research efforts that have leveraged Semantic Web technologies to reason over, and query data across museums and art galleries (Aroyo et al, 2007, Aliaga et al, 2011, Barak et al, 2009, Koutsomitropoulos and Papatheodorou, 2007, Kurtz et al, 2009, Hyvönen et al, 2006, Haslhofer et al, 2010, OeRC, 2014, Monroy et al, 2010, van Ossenbruggen et al, 2007, Sanderson and Van de Sompel, 2010, Schmidt et al, 2011, Theodoridou et al, 2010, Toledo et al, 2009, Wielemaker et al, 2008. Resources, and Things); b) the ability for users to select a geographic location and display it in a map using an ontology taken from BUSTER (a system developed at the University of Bremen to integrate and query heterogeneous information from different geospatial datasets); and c) virtual objects in the form of Web-based resources (e.g., a story-telling system).…”