Using semantic indexing to improve searching performance in web archives

The sheer volume of electronic documents being published on the Web can be overwhelming for users if the searching aspect is not properly addressed. This problem is particularly acute inside archives and repositories containing large collections of web resources or, more precisely, web pages and other web objects. Using the existing search capabilities in web archives, results can be compromised because of the size of data, content heterogeneity and changes in scientific terminologies and meanings. During the course of this research, we will explore whether semantic web technologies, particularly ontology-based annotation and retrieval, could improve precision in search results in multi-disciplinary web archives

The urban heritage characterization using 3D geographic information systems. The system of medium-sized cities in Andalusia

The primary objective of this paper is to approach the use of the 3D Geographic Information Systems (3D GIS), as an instrumental tool that allows us to deal efficiently with the extensive amount of information that characterises a large part of the research carried out in the field of Urbanism and Regional Planning. Specifically, the study focuses on medium-sized cities in Andalusia, the most populous and the second largest region in Spain. The Andalusian urban system is substantially characterised by the historical importance of this type of cities within its territorial organisation, which dates back to more than two thousand years, and whose potential as sustainable and balanced stands out. In particular, it is intended to address features related to urban characterisation as medium-sized cities that have been declared as heritage sites, as well as, the integration of the cultural heritage into urban development planning as an active strategy by the cultural administration of the regional and local governments. In detail, this paper will analyse data relating to the development experienced, their characterisation through urban indicators or the evolution and traceability of their protection. In this sense, the use of 3D GIS will not only allow the efficient recording and the graphical representation of a significant amount of data resulting from the quantitative and qualitative analysis carried out but also model them using the third dimension to facilitate a cross analysis among the cities under study. Definitely, the aim is to demonstrate the suitability use of this technology in this type of scientific research.Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Government of Spain HAR2016-79788-

Metadata enrichment for digital heritage: users as co-creators

This paper espouses the concept of metadata enrichment through an expert and user-focused approach to metadata creation and management. To this end, it is argued the Web 2.0 paradigm enables users to be proactive metadata creators. As Shirky (2008, p.47) argues Web 2.0’s social tools enable “action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive”. Lagoze (2010, p. 37) advises, “the participatory nature of Web 2.0 should not be dismissed as just a popular phenomenon [or fad]”. Carletti (2016) proposes a participatory digital cultural heritage approach where Web 2.0 approaches such as crowdsourcing can be sued to enrich digital cultural objects. It is argued that “heritage crowdsourcing, community-centred projects or other forms of public participation”. On the other hand, the new collaborative approaches of Web 2.0 neither negate nor replace contemporary standards-based metadata approaches. Hence, this paper proposes a mixed metadata approach where user created metadata augments expert-created metadata and vice versa. The metadata creation process no longer remains to be the sole prerogative of the metadata expert. The Web 2.0 collaborative environment would now allow users to participate in both adding and re-using metadata. The case of expert-created (standards-based, top-down) and user-generated metadata (socially-constructed, bottom-up) approach to metadata are complementary rather than mutually-exclusive. The two approaches are often mistakenly considered as dichotomies, albeit incorrectly (Gruber, 2007; Wright, 2007) . This paper espouses the importance of enriching digital information objects with descriptions pertaining the about-ness of information objects. Such richness and diversity of description, it is argued, could chiefly be achieved by involving users in the metadata creation process. This paper presents the importance of the paradigm of metadata enriching and metadata filtering for the cultural heritage domain. Metadata enriching states that a priori metadata that is instantiated and granularly structured by metadata experts is continually enriched through socially-constructed (post-hoc) metadata, whereby users are pro-actively engaged in co-creating metadata. The principle also states that metadata that is enriched is also contextually and semantically linked and openly accessible. In addition, metadata filtering states that metadata resulting from implementing the principle of enriching should be displayed for users in line with their needs and convenience. In both enriching and filtering, users should be considered as prosumers, resulting in what is called collective metadata intelligence

The Archigram Archive

The Archigram archival project made the works of seminal experimental architectural group Archigram available free online for an academic and general audience. It was a major archival work, and a new kind of digital academic archive, displaying material held in different places around the world and variously owned. It was aimed at a wide online design community, discovering it through Google or social media, as well as a traditional academic audience. It has been widely acclaimed in both fields. The project has three distinct but interlinked aims: firstly to assess, catalogue and present the vast range of Archigram's prolific work, of which only a small portion was previously available; secondly to provide reflective academic material on Archigram and on the wider picture of their work presented; thirdly to develop a new type of non-ownership online archive, suitable for both academic research at the highest level and for casual public browsing. The project hybridised several existing methodologies. It combined practical archival and editorial methods for the recovery, presentation and contextualisation of Archigram's work, with digital web design and with the provision of reflective academic and scholarly material. It was designed by the EXP Research Group in the Department of Architecture in collaboration with Archigram and their heirs and with the Centre for Parallel Computing, School of Electronics and Computer Science, also at the University of Westminster. It was rated 'outstanding' in the AHRC's own final report and was shortlisted for the RIBA research awards in 2010. It received 40,000 users and more than 250,000 page views in its first two weeks live, taking the site into twitter’s Top 1000 sites, and a steady flow of visitors thereafter. Further statistics are included in the accompanying portfolio. This output will also be returned to by Murray Fraser for UCL

Consideration in the Design of Art Scholarly Databases

published or submitted for publicatio

The antiquarian photography of Cosmo Innes

The article focuses on the photography of historian Cosmo Innes. The author provides a brief historical background on Innes, discusses his interest in photographing pre-Reformation Scottish churches, and contrasts his work depicting church architecture to his photographs of country mansions, including Cawdor Castle, Auldbar Castle, and Gordon Castle

Application of Digitizing Methods to Urban Area with an Example-- Zong-Ye Historic District, Tainan City

This article attempts to apply digitizing methods to historic assets in old downtown by map overlaying analysis after map rectifying, and then taking textual method through surveying images. After proving and conform through research, townscape could be connected with real historic traces by reality digitizing approach, and it will make a reality aura of formerly district for visitors. In this way the abundant, definite and impressive content of district can be the valuable materials in region development, and the time and space of this district could continue the history and culture of the city. Consequently, this article aims to set up a feasibility proposal applied to it concretely. This article puts forward 1.the district analysis through historic map rectifying 2.the reality digital reconstruction of streets digital archives elements 3.the application on AR(Augmented Reality) in historic district, and brings forward an technological approach which could respond to the challenge of losing regional characteristics in redevelopment process with an example of Zong-Ye historic district in traditional Tainan City. Therefore, this proposal which places great emphasis on local history and culture is equipped with applying value for European cities based on plentiful culture in cultural industries and regional development issues.

Sharing Cultural Heritage: the Clavius on the Web Project

In the last few years the amount of manuscripts digitized and made available on the Web has been constantly increasing. However, there is still a considarable lack of results concerning both the explicitation of their content and the tools developed to make it available. The objective of the Clavius on the Web project is to develop a Web platform exposing a selection of Christophorus Clavius letters along with three different levels of analysis: linguistic, lexical and semantic. The multilayered annotation of the corpus involves a XML-TEI encoding followed by a tokenization step where each token is univocally identified through a CTS urn notation and then associated to a part-of-speech and a lemma. The text is lexically and semantically annotated on the basis of a lexicon and a domain ontology, the former structuring the most relevant terms occurring in the text and the latter representing the domain entities of interest (e.g. people, places, etc.). Moreover, each entity is connected to linked and non linked resources, including DBpedia and VIAF. Finally, the results of the three layers of analysis are gathered and shown through interactive visualization and storytelling techniques. A demo version of the integrated architecture was developed