Seminar, Staford Medical Informatics, August 2006

1. MultimediaN
Pilot E-Culture

2. 2
Pilot E-Culture
 Partners: VU, UvA, CWI,
DEN, ICN
 Subproject of MultimediaN,
a 16 MEuro project on
multimedia technology
funded by the Dutch
government
 Aim: demonstrate added
value of Semantic Web
techniques for virtual
heritage collections

3. 3

4. 4
Hypothesis
 Semantic Web technology is in particular
useful in knowledge-rich domains
or formulated differently
 If we cannot show added value in
knowledge-rich domains, then it may have
no value at all

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Use case: painting style
Find paintings of
a similar style
KLIMT, Gustav
Portrait of Adele Bloch-
Bauer I
1907
Oil and gold on canvas
138 x 138 cm
Austrian Gallery, Vienna

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How can we find this other
‘Art nouveau’ painting?
MUNCH, Edvard
The Scream
1893
Oil, tempera and pastel on
cardboard
91 x 73.5 cm
National Gallery, Oslo

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Issues w.r.t. the use case
 Parse annotation to find matches with thesauri
terms
– E.g. match artists to ULAN individuals
 Artists-style links
– AAT contains styles; ULAN contains artists, but there
is no link
• Learn link from corpora
• Derive it from other annotations
– Domain-specific rules/reasoning needed
• see example in SWRL doc
• Painters may have painted in multiple styles

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Natural-lang proc.
automatic annotation
text stings → concepts
Distributed
cultuurwijzer.nl collections
OAI-based access
Reasoning support
time/space reasoning
Web interface
support for web collections
Presentation facilities
semantic presentation
device-specific
Interoperability
XML/RDF/OWL
Scalability
> 10,000,000 triples
Ontologies
WordNet, AAT, TGN
ULAN, Dutch labels
Search strategies
sibling search
semantic distance
Dublin Core
specializations
dumb-down
semantic annotation
DIGITAL HERITAGE
COLLECTIONS
semantic search
BASELINEENHANCEDENHANCED
FEATURESFEATURES
NEWNEW
FEATURESFEATURES

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Architecture

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Use of thesauri
 RDF/OWL data models of Getty thesauri
– Issues: scope, preserving structure
 WordNet: W3C SWBPD work
http://www.w3.org/TR/wordnet-rdf/
 Multilingualism
– Dutch version of AAT
 Existing collection metadata are parsed to
find matches in thesauri (e.g. creator
name => ULAN entry)

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Distributed vs. centralized
collection data
 Minimal requirement: collection object has
image URI
 Preference for external metadata,
accessed through protocol such as OAI
 In practice, external metadata access is
still cumbersome

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Search strategies
 Basic search: keyword-oriented
 Advanced search:
– Tweaking default search parameters
– Time-related queries
 Faceted search
 Relation search
– How are two URIs related?

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Keyword search with
semantic clustering
1. Btree of literals plus Porter stem and
metaphone index
2. Find resources with matching labels
• Default resources are “Work”s
1. Find related resources by one-way graph
traversal
• owl:inverseOf is used
• Threshold used for constraining search
1. Cluster results (group instances)

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Demonstrator

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Search: WordNet patterns that increase
recall without sacrificing precisions
(Hollink)

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Triple statistics

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Status
 4-year project, now in month 18
 Short-term goals:
– Adding more ethnological collections
– Location-oriented presentation
– User studies with professional users (museum
people) and interested lay persons
– Multi-lingual interface (English, Dutch,
Indonesian)

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Issues
 Getting access to collections is mainly a social
process
– There is usually no principled objection to make data,
metadata and thesauri publicly available, but it still
feels threatening
 Cultural heritage is a good area for a Semantic
Web “island”:
– lots of domain-specific knowledge
– strong application pull
– enormous amount of existing annotations, which have
been built up over centuries

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On-line demo
http://e-culture.multimedian.nl