ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟ
ΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣ
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Information design for cultural documentation
Chryssoula Bekiari1, Panos Constantopoulos1,2, Martin Doerr1
1 Institute of Computer Science, FORTH
2 Athens University of Economics and Business
DELOS Workshop on
Digital Repositories: Interoperability and Common Services
Heraklion, Crete, 11-13/5/2005
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Digital cultural inventory
Cultural goods
Physical and informational objects
Digitization
•
•
•
•
Document and image scanning
Digital photography
Conversion of analog audio and video recordings
Digital transcription
Digital surrogates

Born digital cultural objects
Digital information recordings

Digital cultural inventory
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Virtually unified digital space
• Generated by virtue of the capability for unified access to
independent digital collections
• Value multiplier
• Realization conditions
– syntactic and semantic interoperability
• Preservation
– procedures, metadata
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Creating a Greek digital cultural inventory
• Current main framework
“Information Society” Operational Programme, Measure 1.3
• Highlights of previous actions
• “POLEMON” National Monuments Record System
• “MUSE” and “ARISTIDES” systems, Peloponnesian Ethnographic
Foundation
• “POLYDEUKES” term thesaurus, Ministry of Culture, on-going
• Byzantine monuments recording system, European Centre for Byzantine
and Post-byzantine Monuments
• Historical documents management system, Vikelea Library
• Open access thematic databases, Foundation for the Hellenic World (e.g.,
genealogies, Olympic Games, Greek History, etc.)
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Challenges
• Expected results:
– Very large aggregate digital material
– Infastructures
– Organizational and technical experiences
• Challenges:
– Massiveness and decentralization
– Most institutions involved lack adequate experience
– Heterogeneity (organizational and informational)
• Criteria – quality indices:
–
–
–
–
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validity, accuracy and completeness of data
ease of access
interoperability of the various information repositories
preservability of the inventory
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Support actions
Develop a common set of general guidelines for the design and
implementation of digitization and documentation projects, and for
promoting common practices.
• Digitization methods and procedures
• Organization, integration and preservation of information
• Web design and educational applications
• Intellectual property rights management
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The FORTH-ICS project
• Objective: Develop a guide for designing and applying information
structures for cultural documentation and for supporting the
preservation and interoperability of digital information
• Unit in charge: Centre for Cultural Informatics
• Project leader: Prof. Panos Constantopoulos
• Editors: Chryssoula Bekiari, Panos Constantopoulos, Martin Doerr
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Content and contribution
• Focus: Interoperability
• Approach: Employ common ontological layer
• Results:
– Normative framework: recommendations and suggestions for
conformance with standards and guidelines
– Documentation: a family of digital record types with respective XML
DTDs to support
• recording, description and conservation of physical and informational objects
• Digital preservation
• Publication of digital material
– Interoperability: Guidelines for applying
• an ontology for cultural documentation
• technologies and standards for interoperability, information resource access
• technologies and standards for terminology management
• Novelty:
– A new, comprehensive, common XML DTD for moveable objects and
site monuments compatible with the ontology provided by the CIDOC
CRM.
– First edition of CIDOC CRM (ISO/DIS 21127) in Greek.
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Documentation: from objects to data
physical and
informational
objects
digitization
digital
surrogates
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recording,
description
records
photos
designs
analog recordings
...
recording,
description
data
(digital)
digital
repositories
metadata
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General structure of an object documentation record
• Record identification
Metadata concerning the record as a digital object in itself.
• Object identification
The minimum data necessary to identify the object and uniquely refer to it
independently from any particular context.
• Scientific documentation
– Description of the object as it is in our hands
Classifications, physical constituency and condition, symbolic content, etc.
– History of the object as reported by witnesses or inferred from traces and
evidence
Descriptions of events and activities, such as construction, use, discovery,
conservation, etc., in which the object took part.
– Associations of the object with other objects (e.g., similarity) and events.
• Administration
Data pertaining to the current handling of the object in a museum or collection,
e.g. acquisition, location, exhibition, loan, etc., and which may later be
regarded as relevant to the object history or not.
• References
Metadata about sources of documentation and related bibliography.
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Nature of documentation data - 1
They describe
• Entities
– Physical: the object being documented and, possibly, others related to it.
– Conceptual: they appear in the context of their relation to the object
being documented.
• Events
– Determined by their kind, persons, organizations and objects involved in
specific roles, their limits in place and time, and constituency from other
sub-events.
– An important specialization of events are activities, which are further
characterized by actor, purpose and technique.
– Events are only recorded in the context of their relationship to the object
being documented.
• Associations
– Represent comparisons between objects (e.g. similarity) or cultural
context (e.g. joint use of objects, depiction or copy making, witness).
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Nature of documentation data - 2
Temporal validity
• permanent : unlimited validity
• volatile : limited over a specific time interval
– data should normally be tagged with their validity time
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Nature of documentation data - 3
Information in a record as a set of logical propositions
• May refer to
– specific situations or occurrences
• the pen with which Eleftherios Venizelos signed the Protocol of the Sevres
Convention
• the necklace worn by Queen Amalia on her wedding
– categories
• wedding dress, flag carried in the battlefield, clay pot
• May convey
– part of the history of a particular object
– a frame of hypotheses about part of the history of an object, which
refers to categories of events and other entities
– categorical knowledge, i.e. knowledge about the kinds of objects and
events, not about a particular object
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Information patterns
• Information of the same nature may be contained in
– different parts of an object record
– different records even concerning objects of different kinds
• e.g. time, place, object composition, event, etc.
• Information patterns: specializable types of information units
• Designing documentation records
– Reduced to designing a set of information patterns and a general,
flexible record structure
– Design and conformance with relevant standards much better controlled
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Examples of information patterns
Date
from
until
Object composition
number of parts
part
name
kind
code or cardinal number
Chronology
within
throughout
cultural period
social time
justification
Place
name
code
cadastral number
kind
geopolitical hierarchy
address
coordinates
values
reference point
precision of measurement
geodesic coordinate system
link to design
Dating
chronology
time measurement
value
method
laboratory
Event
name
kind
chronology
place
description
persons involved
organizations involved
objects involved
comprises events
Person
name
biographical data
communication data
role / capacity / social group
Organization
title
legal address
communication data
department
role / capacity / social group
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Data entry
• Naturally follows the sequence of object handling acts, but certain
autonomy of the data entry process is desirable
• Data entry rule
–
–
–
–
necessary
value omission disallowed
compulsory
value must be entered if it exists and is known
optional
Favours breadth over depth
• Value uncertainty
– Conventional policy: least binding
• Date ‘unknown’ or ‘before 1900 AD’
– Effective policy: most precise values within the limits of the
documenter’s knowledge
• A personal computer of unknown production date could be safely dated ‘after
1980 AD’
• Value multiplicity : multiple values by default, unique if specified
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Object record types
•
•
In practice desirable to have a controlled variety of records thus supporting
uniform documentation practices.
Criteria for record type definition:
Intended use
registration
description
administration
conservation
digital preservation
publication of digital material
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Object type
site monuments
moveable objects
text documents
audio
pictures (still, moving)
digital surrogates
inherently digital objects
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Integration of the digital cultural inventory
• The digital cultural inventory is required to:
– remain available and safe despite future failures of equipment or
technological changes (preservation objective)
– support integrated access and use (integration objective)
• Economic dependencies:
– preservation : costs of recovery, re-creation and permanent loss of
information
– integration : costs of access and re-use of distributed and heterogeneous
information
• Decisive technical factors:
–
–
–
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portability across platforms
data and system interoperability among repositories
Web access
Syntactic and semantic interoperability
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Syntactic interoperability
• Common external data represenations
• Individual repositories maintain the freedom to use different
encodings for internal representation and processing
• XML
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Semantic interoperability
• Employ a common conceptual model in formulating semantic
descriptions of objects and digital resources to support uniform
access to them
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Semantic interoperability
ontology
semantic
resource
descriptions
<tag1>
<tag2>
<tag3>
</tag1>
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digital resources
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Ontology for semantic interoperability
• ICOM/CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, ISO/CD 21127.
– An ontology for the cultural domain, which formally describes the concepts
and relations involved in cultural documentation
– Provides a common base for the interpretation of various forms of
documentation
– Does not dictate the documentation elements
• Use of the ontology:
– framework for designing information structures for documentation systems
– communication medium, at the semantic level, between heterogeneous
systems
• CIDOC CRM plays an indispensable role in building an integrated
digital cultural inventory.
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Conclusion
• An approach to developing and employing information structures for
cultural documentation and for the integration and preservation of a
digital cultural inventory aiming at long-term validity and exploitation.
• Dual strategy
– propose specific standard (meta)data structures for specific application
areas
– all those structures are related to the common core ontology of the
CIDOC CRM, which provides semantic interoperability in the long term
•
Finding aids, such as Dublin Core, can be incorporated at schema
level.
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