SCULPTEUR IST Project
1 May 2002 - 30 April 2005
France
The SCULPTEUR consortium is developing a system which enables users to browse and navigate their digital art collections using ontologies as well as to search their collections by creating and submitting 2 & 3D content-based and metadata queries. Content-based queries can include searching for art objects of a similar colour, texture or shape as well as searching for the whole object of which the user has an image of a fragment.
At the heart of the SCULPTEUR architecture is an ontology describing the application domains of the galleries and museums involved in the project. This is being developed from the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) developed over the last 10 years by the CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group. The CRM provides definitions and a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation. These concepts and their relationships provide a semantic layer in the SCULPTEUR system and the multimedia objects and their metadata items provide instance information for populating the ontology. The approach builds on the multimedia thesaurus idea.
The graphical concept browser will demonstrate how to navigate the digital collection through the concepts and retrieve instances of concepts in which users are interested. Thus a user could navigate to a particular sculptor and retrieve all sculptures created by that sculptor in a particular period.
The concept based navigation and retrieval may be combined with content based searching so that, for example, all objects created by a particular sculptor and similar in shape to a given query sculpture could be retrieved.
Also, a user could perform a content-based query using shape matching on a figurine to retrieve other figurines which were not similar in shape but which are associated with the same concept in the ontology.
Join the SCULPTEUR users' Interest Group at http://www.sculpteurweb.org/html/sig.htm(opens in new window)
At the heart of the SCULPTEUR architecture is an ontology describing the application domains of the galleries and museums involved in the project. This is being developed from the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) developed over the last 10 years by the CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group. The CRM provides definitions and a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation. These concepts and their relationships provide a semantic layer in the SCULPTEUR system and the multimedia objects and their metadata items provide instance information for populating the ontology. The approach builds on the multimedia thesaurus idea.
The graphical concept browser will demonstrate how to navigate the digital collection through the concepts and retrieve instances of concepts in which users are interested. Thus a user could navigate to a particular sculptor and retrieve all sculptures created by that sculptor in a particular period.
The concept based navigation and retrieval may be combined with content based searching so that, for example, all objects created by a particular sculptor and similar in shape to a given query sculpture could be retrieved.
Also, a user could perform a content-based query using shape matching on a figurine to retrieve other figurines which were not similar in shape but which are associated with the same concept in the ontology.
Join the SCULPTEUR users' Interest Group at http://www.sculpteurweb.org/html/sig.htm(opens in new window)