EU funded research project puts an end to sore feet and long queues for museum enthusiasts
The EU funded project SCULPTEUR is developing a new way of visiting Europe's greatest galleries and museums, making endless queues and sore feet a thing of the past. Using semantic web technology, the Semantic and content-based multimedia exploitation for European benefit (SCULPTEUR) consortium is developing an online image retrieval system capable of exploring and analysing thousands of images from major art galleries across Europe. SCULPTEUR is a multidisciplinary partnership, involving ten partners from industrial, academic, research and cultural sectors in the UK, Italy and France. The three year project has received two million euro in funding under the Information Society Technologies programme (IST) of the Fifth Framework Programme (FP5). 'There are many hundreds of European cultural heritage archives of special scientific and cultural interest. [...] We can clearly see a European wide need to preserve, study and protect these heritage archives, while at the same time making them available to the scientist, researcher, curator, historian and the European people for their enjoyment and learning,' notes the project consortium. Similar multimedia digital libraries exist for storing, searching and retrieving more diverse multimedia types, such as the 2D image library developed in the recently completed IST project, ARTISTE. However, through SCULPTEUR, the knowledge and expertise has been refined to bring about a more sophisticated search system. The most distinctive feature of the new digital library is that it is capable of capturing 3D images of museum artefacts. Such techniques are of particular interest to the museum community, which is eager to archive three-dimensional items and artefacts in their collections. In addition to developing new methods of capturing 3D images, the project is also focusing on delivering technology for navigation, search and retrieval that is compatible with existing digital collections across Europe. By ensuring interoperability, users can, at the click of a button, visit not only the Louvre in Paris, but also the National gallery in London or the Uffizi gallery in Florence.
Kraje
France, Italy, United Kingdom