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Rapid Prototyping a Semantic Web Application for Cultural Heritage: The Case of MANTIC
Abstract
MANTIC is a Web application that integrates heterogenous and legacy data about the archeology of Milan (Italy); the application
combines semantic Web and mashup technologies. Semantic Web models and technologies supports model-driven and standard-compliant
data integration on the Web; the mashup approach supports a spatial and temporal aware form of information presentation. MANTIC
shows that model-driven information integration applications for cultural heritage can be fast prototyped with limited deployment
effort by combining semantic and mashup technologies. Instead, higher-level modeling aspects need a deep analysis and require
domain expertise.
... • The Knowledge represented in this project will be also analysable and visualisable from a spatio-temporal perspective, and tools and services will be provided in order to deal with these aspects. Reference works that will inspire us in this direction are [3], [4], [5]. • The Indiana MAS will integrate agents able to analyze and interpret drawings, agents able to reason on pictures, and agents able to understand natural language (in at least Italian, English, French). ...
... These technologies are exploited by social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and everywhere a support for the effective analysis and computation of TeraBytes of information is needed. Following Google BigTable database 4 , the open source community developed the Hadoop high-scalable distributed filesystem that is de facto a clone of BigTable, and is based on the MapReduce algorithm for the creation of parallel tasks that work in each datanode of a cluster, without the need for a developer to implement the mechanism of task distribution, delivery, and execution. The master node, that is the namenode, checks and handles automatically the different processes that run on each datanode of the system. ...
The Indiana MAS project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research "Futuro in Ricerca 2010" program, aims at providing a framework for the digital protection and conservation of rock art natural and cultural heritage sites, by storing, organizing and presenting information about them in such a way to encourage scientific research and to raise the interest and sensibility towards them from the common people. The project involves two research units, namely Genova (Dipartimento di Informatica, Bioingegneria, Robotica e Ingegneria dei Sistemi) and Salerno (Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica), for a period of 36 months, starting from march 8th, 2012. The technologies adopted in the project range from agents to ontologies, as requested by the complex nature of the platform, where each module is devoted to a specific task: sketch and symbol recognition, semantic interpretation of complex visual scenes, multi-language text understanding, storing, classification and indexing of multimedia and heterogeneous digital objects. All of them should cooperate and coordinate in order to enable higher level components to reason on them and to detect relationships among different digital objects, hence providing new hypothesis based on such relationships.
... One of the authors' reasons for creating such a system was the fact that cultural heritage around the world is under considerable risk from natural and anthropogenic threats. The creation of a web application for cultural heritage has also been addressed by Mantegari et al. [5] and Chalkidou et al. [6]. An important part of documenting cultural heritage is the creation of 3D models and their subsequent presentation. ...
Vernacular architecture is an integral part of the national cultural heritage. Today, however, many of these buildings exist only on old plans or photographs and the average citizen has no opportunity to get acquainted with this part of the national identity. Therefore, in our work, we present the development of two web applications with the aim of creating a virtual open-air museum for presenting vernacular architecture in the Czech Republic. The applications were created using open-source technologies, and are implemented with methods that allow easy transfer from one operating system to another. The presented content is a carefully selected sub-sample of more than 10,000 available records representing all regional types of vernacular architecture. The result is one application designed for editors to manage the presented content and one application allowing interactive viewing of the available geo-located records designed for the general public. Individual records can be searched either directly using the map window or by querying the attribute table. These records contain descriptive information about the object, as well as historical photographs and plans and, for some objects, additional information in the form of 3D models, PDF documents and other files. The applications are designed in such a way that their content can be freely expanded in the future and thus contribute to the popularization of vernacular architecture among the general public, which was the main reason for their creation.
... NavEditOW a intégré un moteur de wiki pour la visualisation des documents stockés[BMPV08]. MANTIC est un portail Web sur les informations archéologiques de la ville de Milan[MPV10].Il intègre différentes sources de données et son schéma global est basé sur CIDOC-CRM. Porphyry (http: //www.porphyry.org) ...
Les Systèmes d'Information Scientifique (SIS) sont des Systèmes d'Information (SI) dont le but est de produire de la connaissance et non pas de gérer ou contrôler une activité de production de biens ou de services comme les SI d'entreprise. Les SIS se caractérisent par des domaines de recherche fortement collaboratifs impliquant des équipes pluridisciplinaires et le plus souvent géographiquement éloignées, ils manipulent des données aux structures très variables dans le temps qui vont au-delà de la simple hétérogénéité : nuages de points issus de scanner 3D, modèles numériques de terrain, cartographie, publications, données issues de spectromètre de masse ou de technique de thermoluminescence, données attributaires en très grand volume, etc. Ainsi, contrairement aux bases de données d'entreprise qui sont modélisées avec des structures établies par l'activité qu'elles supportent, les données scientifiques ne peuvent pas se contenter de schémas de données pré-definis puisque la structure des données évolue rapidement de concert avec l'évolution de la connaissance. La gestion de données scientifiques nécessite une architecture de SIS ayant un niveau d'extensibilité plus élevé que dans un SI d'entreprise. Afin de supporter l'extensibilité tout en contrôlant la qualité des données mais aussi l'interopérabilité, nous proposons une architecture de SIS reposant sur : - des données référentielles fortement structurées, identifiables lors de la phase d'analyse et amenées à évoluer rarement ; - des données complémentaires multi-modèles (matricielles, cartographiques, nuages de points 3D, documentaires, etc.). Pour établir les liens entre les données complémentaires et les données référentielles, nous avons utilisé un unique paradigme, l'annotation sémantique. Nous avons proposé un modèle formel d'annotation à base ontologique pour construire des annotations sémantiques dont la cohérence et la consistance peuvent être contrôlées par une ontologie et des règles. Dans ce cadre, les annotations offrent ainsi une contextualisation des données qui permet de vérifier leur cohérence, par rapport à la connaissance du domaine. Nous avons dressé les grandes lignes d'une sémantique du processus d'annotation par analogie avec la sémantique des langages de programmation. Nous avons validé notre proposition, à travers deux collaborations pluridisciplinaires : - le projet ANR CARE (Corpus Architecturae Religiosae Europeae - IV-X saec. ANR-07- CORP-011) dans le domaine de l'archéologie. Son objectif était de développer un corpus numérique de documents multimédia sur l'évolution des monuments religieux du IVe au XIe siècle (http://care.tge-adonis.fr). Un assistant d'annotation a été développé pour assurer la qualité des annotations par rapport à la connaissance représentée dans l'ontologie. Ce projet a donné lieu au développement d'une extension sémantique pour MediaWiki ; - le projet eClims dans le domaine de la protéomique clinique. eClims est un composant clinique d'un LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) développé pour la plate-forme de protéomique CLIPP. eClims met en oeuvre un outil d'intégration basé sur le couplage entre des modèles représentant les sources et le système protéomique, et des ontologies utilisées comme médiatrices entre ces derniers. Les différents contrôles que nous mettons en place garantissent la validité des domaines de valeurs, la complétude, la consistance des données et leur cohérence. Le stockage des annotations est assuré par une Base de Données orientées colonnes associée à une Base de Données relationnelles.
... NavEditOW a intégré un moteur de wiki pour le rendu des documents stockés (Bonomi et al., 2008). MANTIC est un portail web sur les informations archéologiques de la ville de Milan (Mantegari et al., 2010). Il intègre différentes sources de données et son schéma global est basé sur CIDOC-CRM. ...
... [7]). The latter is the result of a long term research activity on the integration of metadata, initially focused on the context of museum data, and it represents a flexible and semantically rich ontology for Cultural Heritage; it has been successfully employed (either in toto or as a starting point for the definition of simpler conceptual or logical models) in several cases described in the literature (see, e.g., [8], [9], [6], [10], [11]) and it is growingly employed in large scale international cultural-heritage digital libraries (like Europeana [12]). A preliminary analysis aimed at evaluating the adequacy of the CIDOC CRM fundamental structure to the specific context of the TIVal project was performed. ...
Valuable documents are included in the corpus of information, documentation, digital contents produced in the course of projects aimed at studying and defining a preservation (and possibly restoration) plan for a significant piece of cultural heritage. These documents could be exploited to effectively further valorize the cultural heritage and support its fruition by a wide audience of potential users. The TIVal project aims at supporting the integration of this kind of different, distinct and heterogeneous multimedia contents into a comprehensive and accessible portal. The latter proposes specific navigation paths, dynamically connecting the different contents according to a specific logical rationale of the path itself (e.g. show information supporting a critical analysis of a piece of cultural heritage). To support the dynamic creation of these paths, contents are organized by means of the adoption of a domain ontology derived from CIDOC CRM. The paper presents the rationale of the approach, the architecture of the system, the structure of the ontology, and relevant examples of its usage by specific navigation paths.
... The framework integrates a wiki engine for rendering documents stored in the ontological tier. In the same view, MANTIC is a web application that realizes a portal for archaeological information about the city of Milan [31]. MANTIC integrates different data sources and the global schema is based on CIDOC-CRM. ...
In this paper, we highlight how semantic wikis can be relevant solutions for building cooperative data driven applications in domains characterized by a rapid evolution of knowledge. We will point out the semantic capabilities of annotated databases and structured wikis to provide better quality of content, to support complex queries and finally to carry on different type of users. Then we compare database application development with wiki for domains that encompass evolving knowledge. We detail the architecture of WikiBridge, a semantic wiki, which integrates templates forms and allows complex annotations as well as consistency checking. We describe the archaeological CARE project, and explain the conceptual modeling approach. A specific section is dedicated to ontology design, which is the compulsory foundational knowledge for the application. We finally report related works of the semantic wiki use for archaeological projects.
... In the same view, MANTIC is a web application that realizes a portal for archaeological information about the city of Milan [12]. MANTIC integrates different data sources and the global schema is based on CIDOC-CRM. ...
Wikis are appropriate systems for community-authored content. In the past few years, they show that are particularly suitable for collaborative works in cultural heritage. In this paper, we highlight how wikis can be relevant solutions for building cooperative applications in domains characterized by a rapid evolution of knowledge. We will point out the capabilities of semantic extension to provide better quality of content, to improve searching, to support complex queries and finally to carry out different type of users. We describe the CARE project and explain the conceptual modeling approach. We detail the architecture of WikiBridge, a semantic wiki which allows simple, n-ary and recursive annotations as well as consistency checking. A specific section is dedicated to the ontology design which is the compulsory foundational knowledge for the application.
The EU Project INCEPTION will create a platform that is able to exchange content according to state-of-the-art available open BIM standards. This INCEPTION open Heritage BIM platform is not only exchanging data according to existing state-of-the-art standards, but it is based on a new Heritage BIM model using Semantic Web technology. This allows applications to retrieve content according to modern query languages like SPARQL and allows user defined ‘on-the-fly’ extensions of the standard. This paper describes the structure and development of this new Heritage BIM standard. The Heritage BIM standard is developed by several Semantic Web and BIM standardization specialists in combination with top experts in the field of Cultural Heritage, all of them partners within the INCEPTION project.
In this paper we focus on the issue of pervasive applications and service development supporting cultural heritage. Modeling and creation of unified, structured and extensible artwork badge, here referred as booklet, repre-sents the base to exploit such structured information as the building block for innovative amazing and more involving multimedia fruition paths in the cultural heritage domains. So we propose an integrated approach to cover multiple issues represented by: (i) enriching the collection of available information about artworks, from domain experts and well-assessed sources; (ii) structuring of such heterogeneous information in a unified model; (iii) stimulating into no expert and, more generally, common people the attitude to take care and valorize cultural richness and goods, by the way of involving them to actively contribute to the composition and enrichment process of the artworks information and of proposing innovative and pervasive ways to enjoy cultural goods, even through the means of social networks channels and explicit feedback system. Common people's and domain experts' precious con-tributions have to be verified, merged, homogenized and structured to become knowledge, in the form of a booklet. To collect such data, there's the need to provide proper tools to people and new kinds of presentation and fruition experiences. In this perspective, we propose a prototypal framework architecture, organized as a Service Oriented Ar-chitecture (SOA) and focused on the modeling of knowledge and on the orchestration of a set of software services involved in the verification, merging and homogenization of different kinds of retrieved data.
We are developing a knowledge base that integrates complementary archaeological information sources. Our source data comprise complementary scientific databases and corpora describing finds with inscriptions and iconography of the Roman era. The integration of such complementary information is innovative and of immense potential value for the cultural heritage domain. Integration is achieved by intellectually interpreting each source schema in terms of the CIDOC CRM model and storing it in an RDF knowledge base, thus creating a body of unique archaeological knowledge in digital form. Our main objective is to provide procedures for information extraction and global querying over all the contents of the complementary resources. Additionally we aim at performing reliable statistical evaluation of the integrated data. In order to ensure that the methods used converge towards the best state of knowledge available and that the results are of high quality, we apply data cleaning procedures both at the individual sources and at the integrated knowledge base.
Findings from a data mapping and extraction exercise undertaken as part of the STAR project are described and related to recent work in the area. The exercise was undertaken in conjunction with English Heritage and encompassed five differently structured relational databases containing various results of archaeological excavations. The aim of the exercise was to demonstrate the potential benefits in cross searching data expressed as RDF and conforming to a common overarching conceptual data structure schema - the English Heritage Centre for Archaeology ontological model (CRM-EH), an extension of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM). A semi- automatic mapping/extraction tool proved an essential component. The viability of the approach is demonstrated by web services and a client application on an integrated data and concept network.
Integration of metadata from heterogeneous sources is a major issue when connecting cultural institutions to digital library
networks. Uniform access to metadata is impeded by the structural and semantic heterogeneities of the metadata and metadata
schemes used in the source systems. In this paper we discuss the methodologies we applied to ingest proprietary metadata into the BRICKS digital library network and to process CIDOC CRM metadata in terms of search and retrieval, and how we strove to hide the semantic complexity from the end-user while exploiting the semantic richness of the underlying metadata.
Integrated digital access to multiple collections is a promi- nent issue for many Cultural Heritage institutions. Metadata describing diverse collections must be interoperable to achieve integrated access. Aligning the controlled vocabularies that are used to annotate objects in dierent Cultural Heritage collections could provide such interoperabil- ity. In this paper, we present an experiment where we apply Semantic Web techniques to match the vocabularies of two collections. We discuss the steps that are required for such matching, namely formalizing the initial resources using Semantic Web languages, and running ontology mapping tools on the resulting representations. In addition, we present a prototype that enables one to browse the two collections using the obtained alignment while still providing the user with the original vo- cabulary structures.
CultureSampo is an application demonstration of a national level publication system of cultural heritage contents on the Web, based on
ideas and technologies of the Semantic (Web and) Web 2.0. On the semantic side, the system presents new solutions to interoperability
problems of dealing with multiple ontologies of different domains, and to problems of integrating multiple metadata schemas
and cross-domain content into a homogeneous semantic portal. A novelty of the system is to use semantic models based on events
and narrative process descriptions for modeling and visualizing cultural phenomena, and for semantic recommendations. On the
Web 2.0 side, CultureSampo proposes and demonstrates a content creation process for collaborative, distributed ontology and content development including
different memory organizations and citizens. The system provides the cultural heritage contents to end-users in a new way
through multiple (nine) thematic perspectives, based on semantic visualizations. Furthermore, CultureSampo services are available for external web-applications to use through semantic AJAX widgets.
Europe’s digital cultural heritage content has tremendous exploitation potential in applications such as Education, Publishing, e-Commerce, Public-Access and Tourism. Value is hugely amplified if the content can be aggregated repurposed and distributed at a European level. The eCHASE project seeks to demonstrate that public-private partnerships between content holders and commercial service providers can create new services and a sustainable business based on access and exploitation of digital cultural heritage content. This paper describes the eCHASE demonstrator from a technical perspective, briefly detailing the tools and components which make up the system and the use of open standards.
Web mashups are Web applications developed using contents and services available online. Despite rapidly increasing interest in mashups over the past two years, comprehensive development tools and frameworks are lacking, and in most cases mashing up a new application implies a significant manual programming effort. This article overviews current tools, frameworks, and trends that aim to facilitate mashup development. The authors use a set of characteristic dimensions to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of some representative approaches.
Europe’s digital cultural heritage content has tremendous exploitation potential in applications such as Education, Publishing, e-Commerce, Public-Access and Tourism. Value is hugely amplified if the content can be aggregated repurposed and distributed at a European level. The eCHASE project seeks to demonstrate that public-private partnerships between content holders and commercial service providers can create new services and a sustainable business based on access and exploitation of digital cultural heritage content. This paper describes the eCHASE demonstrator from a technical perspective, briefly detailing the tools and components which make up the system and the use of open standards.
Well-established instruments such as authority files and a growing set of data structures such as CIDOC CRM, FRBRoo, and MODS provide the foundation for emerging, new digital services. While solid, these instruments alone neither capture the essential data on which traditional scholarship depends nor enable the services which we can al- ready identify as fundamental to any eResearch, cyberinfrastructure or virtual research environment for intellectual discourse. This paper de- scribes a general model for primary sources, entities and thematic topics, the gap between this model and emerging infrastructure, and the tasks necessary to bridge it.
An Implementation of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (4.2.4) in OWL-DL
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