MOSAICA - Semantically Enhanced, Multifaceted, Collaborative Access to Cultural Heritage
MOSAICA has designed a technology toolbox for intelligent presentation, knowledge-based discovery and interactive and creative educational experience of cultural heritage resources.
- Project type: STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project)
- Start date: 1 June 2006
- Duration: 30 months
- EU funding: € 2 500 000
- Number of partners: 11
- Project coordinator: ORT France
- Contact: Mr. Raphaël Attias
After almost 2000 years of Diaspora, Jewish heritage is an outstanding example of global cultural presence, with a strong historical impact on many nations, particularly in Europe. This is why the MOSAICA project team has selected Jewish heritage as a showcase for technologies for the presentation and discovery of diversified cultural content and its use in education.
The project has created a prototype for a technologically advanced web portal, featuring multifaceted interfaces for knowledge based exploration and online utilities empowering users to collaboratively author and manage cultural resources in a globally distributed environment.
The MOSAICA interfaces include:
- Semantic directory. The MOSAICA ontology is generated dynamically from multiple distributed ontologies on Jewish heritage already available online. Unlike regular directories that are hierarchically organised, the MOSAICA semantic directory allows for conceptual navigation by following additional, complex semantic relations.
- Semantic search engine. The search and retrieval facility is empowered with logical reasoning allowing semantic inference and extending keyword querying into the domain of conceptualisation. Both the semantic directory and the semantic search engine allow seamless integration of diversified cultural resources into a single conceptual frame.
- Repository of educational resources. Users are enabled to discover the virtual worlds of MOSAICA on the paths of virtual expeditions, built as thematically organised successions of virtualised cultural objects, bound together by a conceptual model, and allowing interactive exploration through alternative trails.
- GIS (Geographical Information System) empowered map. The use of semantically enriched GIS technology allows for establishing semantic references between the information displayed on a map.
Besides, MOSAICA has developed a framework for the ontology based, interactive conceptualisation of cultural resources, using the following online utilities:
- Online semantic annotator. Free text annotation tools allow users to comment and recommend individual cultural objects or to associate them with relevant ontological concepts.
- Online ontology editor. The editor empowers users with convivial means to further develop their own conceptual models, and to dynamically enrich the MOSAICA ontology with their own semantics.
- Virtual expedition maker. This is a set of complementary online utilities based on a comprehensive methodology for developing educational resources that guide users in designing their own virtual expeditions.