SCULPTEUR: Towards a new paradigm for multimedia museum information
handling
M. Addis1, M. Boniface1, S. Goodall2,
P. Grimwood1, S. Kim2, P. Lewis2, K.
Martinez2, A. Stevenson1
1[mja,mjb,pg,as]@it-innovation.soton.ac.uk. IT Innovation,
University of Southampton, SO16 7NP, UK.
2
[sg02r,sk,phl,km]@ecs.soton.ac.uk. Department of Electronics and
Computer Science, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK.
Abstract
This paper describes the design and prototype implementation of a novel
architecture for integrated concept, metadata and content based browsing
and retrieval of museum information. The work is part of a European
project involving several major galleries and the aim is to provide more
versatile access to digital collections of museum artefacts, including 2-D
images, 3-D models and other multimedia representations. An ontology for
the museum domain, based on the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, is being
developed as a semantic layer with references to the digital collection as
instance information. A graphical concept browser is an integral component
in the user interface, allowing navigation through the semantic layer,
display of thumbnails, or full representations of artefacts and textual
information in appropriate viewers and the invocation of conventional
content based searching or combined querying. Semantic Web technologies
are used in system integration to describe how tools for analysis and
visualisation can be applied to different data types and sources. This
supports flexible and managed formulation, execution and interpretation of
the results of distributed multimedia queries. Combined searches using
concepts, content and metadata can be initiated from a single user
interface.