ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟ ΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣ ΙΤΕ 11/5/20051 information design for cultural...
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11/5/2005 1
ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
Information design for cultural documentation
Chryssoula Bekiari1, Panos Constantopoulos1,2, Martin Doerr1
1 Institute of Computer Science, FORTH2 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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
Digital cultural inventory
Cultural goodsPhysical 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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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Post-byzantine Monuments• Historical documents management system, Vikelea Library • Open access thematic databases, Foundation for the Hellenic World (e.g.,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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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:– validity, accuracy and completeness of data
– ease of access
– interoperability of the various information repositories
– preservability of the inventory
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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ 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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ Documentation: from objects to data
recording,description
digitization
physical and informational
objects
digital repositories
recording,description
data (digital)
metadatadigital
surrogates
recordsphotosdesigns
analog recordings...
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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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.
• AdministrationData 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.
• ReferencesMetadata about sources of documentation and related bibliography.
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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ 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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ 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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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 Object type
registrationdescription administrationconservationdigital preservationpublication of digital material
site monumentsmoveable objectstext documentsaudiopictures (still, moving)digital surrogatesinherently digital objects
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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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:– portability across platforms
– data and system interoperability among repositories
– Web access Syntactic and semantic interoperability
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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
Semantic interoperability
<tag1> <tag2> <tag3></tag1>
<tag1> <tag2> <tag3></tag1>
ontology
digital resources
semanticresource
descriptions
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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ
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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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ 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.