MultiMATCH - Multilingual/Multimedia Access to Cultural Heritage
MultiMATCH is a multilingual search engine specifically designed for access, organisation and personalised presentation of cultural heritage information.
- Project type: STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project)
- Start date: 1 May 2006
- Duration: 30 months
- EU funding: € 3 114 000
- Number of partners: 11
- Project coordinator: Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy
- Contact: Dr Carol Peters
Background
On the web, cultural heritage content is everywhere, in traditional environments such as libraries, museums, galleries and audiovisual archives, but also in popular magazines and newspapers, in multiple languages and multiple media. The aim of the MultiMATCH project was to enable users to explore and interact with online accessible cultural heritage content, across media types and language boundaries.
Technology results
The MultiMATCH search engine is able to:
- identify relevant material via an in-depth crawling of selected cultural heritage institutions, accepting and processing any semantic web encoding of the information retrieved;
- crawl the Internet to identify websites with cultural heritage information, locating relevant texts, images and videos, regardless of the source and target languages used to write the query and/or describe the results;
- automatically classify the results in a semantic-web compliant fashion, based on a document's content, on its metadata, on its context, and on the occurrence of relevant cultural heritage concepts in the document
- automatically extract relevant information which can be used to create cross-links between related material, such as the biography of an artist, exhibitions of his/her work, video documentaries, critical appraisals, etc.;
- organise and further analyse the material crawled to serve focused queries generated from the information needs formulated by the user;
- organise and display search results in an aggregated way, with resources clearly identified by type and sorted by priority, whether it is relevance, historical period or other criteria.
- carry out multilingual searches, enabling users to access and exploit the information retrieved regardless of language barriers (the prototype developed during this project supports six languages).
Benefits
The MultiMatch system uses a variety of smart search methods, pushing further the state of the art in multimedia and cross-language search and retrieval. Although tested and validated in the cultural heritage sector, the concept is potentially applicable to other fields, like sports, politics, economics and technology.
MultiMatch technology is being used by the European Film Gateway.