Developing the ArchAIDE Application: A digital workflow for identifying, organising and sharing archaeological pottery using automated image recognition

Pottery is of fundamental importance for understanding archaeological contexts, facilitating the understanding of production, trade flows, and social interactions. Pottery characterisation and the classification of ceramics is still a manual process, reliant on analogue catalogues created by specialists, held in archives and libraries. The ArchAIDE project worked to streamline, optimise and economise the mundane aspects of these processes, using the latest automatic image recognition technology, while retaining key decision points necessary to create trusted results. Specifically, ArchAIDE worked to support classification and interpretation work (during both fieldwork and post-excavation analysis) with an innovative app for tablets and smartphones. This article summarises the work of this three-year project, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement N.693548, with a consortium of partners representing both the academic and industry-led ICT (Information and Communications Technology) domains, and the academic and development-led archaeology domains. The collaborative work of the archaeological and technical partners created a pipeline where potsherds are photographed, their characteristics compared against a trained neural network, and the results returned with suggested matches from a comparative collection with typical pottery types and characteristics. Once the correct type is identified, all relevant information for that type is linked to the new sherd and stored within a database that can be shared online. ArchAIDE integrated a variety of novel and best-practice approaches, both in the creation of the app, and the communication of the project to a range of stakeholders

An object-based approach to retrieval of image and video content

Promising new directions have been opened up for content-based visual retrieval in recent years. Object-based retrieval which allows users to manipulate video objects as part of their searching and browsing interaction, is one of these. It is the purpose of this thesis to constitute itself as a part of a larger stream of research that investigates visual objects as a possible approach to advancing the use of semantics in content-based visual retrieval. The notion of using objects in video retrieval has been seen as desirable for some years, but only very recently has technology started to allow even very basic object-location functions on video. The main hurdles to greater use of objects in video retrieval are the overhead of object segmentation on large amounts of video and the issue of whether objects can actually be used efficiently for multimedia retrieval. Despite this, there are already some examples of work which supports retrieval based on video objects. This thesis investigates an object-based approach to content-based visual retrieval. The main research contributions of this work are a study of shot boundary detection on compressed domain video where a fast detection approach is proposed and evaluated, and a study on the use of objects in interactive image retrieval. An object-based retrieval framework is developed in order to investigate object-based retrieval on a corpus of natural image and video. This framework contains the entire processing chain required to analyse, index and interactively retrieve images and video via object-to-object matching. The experimental results indicate that object-based searching consistently outperforms image-based search using low-level features. This result goes some way towards validating the approach of allowing users to select objects as a basis for searching video archives when the information need dictates it as appropriate

Semantic Knowledge Graphs for the News: A Review

ICT platforms for news production, distribution, and consumption must exploit the ever-growing availability of digital data. These data originate from different sources and in different formats; they arrive at different velocities and in different volumes. Semantic knowledge graphs (KGs) is an established technique for integrating such heterogeneous information. It is therefore well-aligned with the needs of news producers and distributors, and it is likely to become increasingly important for the news industry. This article reviews the research on using semantic knowledge graphs for production, distribution, and consumption of news. The purpose is to present an overview of the field; to investigate what it means; and to suggest opportunities and needs for further research and development.publishedVersio

On Making in the Digital Humanities

On Making in the Digital Humanities fills a gap in our understanding of digital humanities projects and craft by exploring the processes of making as much as the products that arise from it. The volume draws focus to the interwoven layers of human and technological textures that constitute digital humanities scholarship. To do this, it assembles a group of well-known, experienced and emerging scholars in the digital humanities to reflect on various forms of making (we privilege here the creative and applied side of the digital humanities). The volume honours the work of John Bradley, as it is totemic of a practice of making that is deeply informed by critical perspectives. A special chapter also honours the profound contributions that this volume’s co-editor, Stéfan Sinclair, made to the creative, applied and intellectual praxis of making and the digital humanities. Stéfan Sinclair passed away on 6 August 2020. The chapters gathered here are individually important, but together provide a very human view on what it is to do the digital humanities, in the past, present and future. This book will accordingly be of interest to researchers, teachers and students of the digital humanities; creative humanities, including maker spaces and culture; information studies; the history of computing and technology; and the history of science and the humanities

Knowledge representation and text mining in biomedical, healthcare, and political domains

Knowledge representation and text mining can be employed to discover new knowledge and develop services by using the massive amounts of text gathered by modern information systems. The applied methods should take into account the domain-specific nature of knowledge. This thesis explores knowledge representation and text mining in three application domains. Biomolecular events can be described very precisely and concisely with appropriate representation schemes. Protein–protein interactions are commonly modelled in biological databases as binary relationships, whereas the complex relationships used in text mining are rich in information. The experimental results of this thesis show that complex relationships can be reduced to binary relationships and that it is possible to reconstruct complex relationships from mixtures of linguistically similar relationships. This encourages the extraction of complex relationships from the scientific literature even if binary relationships are required by the application at hand. The experimental results on cross-validation schemes for pair-input data help to understand how existing knowledge regarding dependent instances (such those concerning protein–protein pairs) can be leveraged to improve the generalisation performance estimates of learned models. Healthcare documents and news articles contain knowledge that is more difficult to model than biomolecular events and tend to have larger vocabularies than biomedical scientific articles. This thesis describes an ontology that models patient education documents and their content in order to improve the availability and quality of such documents. The experimental results of this thesis also show that the Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation measures are a viable option for the automatic evaluation of textual patient record summarisation methods and that the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve can be used in a large-scale sentiment analysis. The sentiment analysis of Reuters news corpora suggests that the Western mainstream media portrays China negatively in politics-related articles but not in general, which provides new evidence to consider in the debate over the image of China in the Western media

Strategies for image visualisation and browsing

PhDThe exploration of large information spaces has remained a challenging task even though the proliferation of database management systems and the state-of-the art retrieval algorithms is becoming pervasive. Signi cant research attention in the multimedia domain is focused on nding automatic algorithms for organising digital image collections into meaningful structures and providing high-semantic image indices. On the other hand, utilisation of graphical and interactive methods from information visualisation domain, provide promising direction for creating e cient user-oriented systems for image management. Methods such as exploratory browsing and query, as well as intuitive visual overviews of image collection, can assist the users in nding patterns and developing the understanding of structures and content in complex image data-sets. The focus of the thesis is combining the features of automatic data processing algorithms with information visualisation. The rst part of this thesis focuses on the layout method for displaying the collection of images indexed by low-level visual descriptors. The proposed solution generates graphical overview of the data-set as a combination of similarity based visualisation and random layout approach. Second part of the thesis deals with problem of visualisation and exploration for hierarchical organisation of images. Due to the absence of the semantic information, images are considered the only source of high-level information. The content preview and display of hierarchical structure are combined in order to support image retrieval. In addition to this, novel exploration and navigation methods are proposed to enable the user to nd the way through database structure and retrieve the content. On the other hand, semantic information is available in cases where automatic or semi-automatic image classi ers are employed. The automatic annotation of image items provides what is referred to as higher-level information. This type of information is a cornerstone of multi-concept visualisation framework which is developed as a third part of this thesis. This solution enables dynamic generation of user-queries by combining semantic concepts, supported by content overview and information ltering. Comparative analysis and user tests, performed for the evaluation of the proposed solutions, focus on the ways information visualisation a ects the image content exploration and retrieval; how e cient and comfortable are the users when using di erent interaction methods and the ways users seek for information through di erent types of database organisation

Inverse software configuration management

Software systems are playing an increasingly important role in almost every aspect of today’s society such that they impact on our businesses, industry, leisure, health and safety. Many of these systems are extremely large and complex and depend upon the correct interaction of many hundreds or even thousands of heterogeneous components. Commensurate with this increased reliance on software is the need for high quality products that meet customer expectations, perform reliably and which can be cost-effectively and safely maintained. Techniques such as software configuration management have proved to be invaluable during the development process to ensure that this is the case. However, there are a very large number of legacy systems which were not developed under controlled conditions, but which still, need to be maintained due to the heavy investment incorporated within them. Such systems are characterised by extremely high program comprehension overheads and the probability that new errors will be introduced during the maintenance process often with serious consequences. To address the issues concerning maintenance of legacy systems this thesis has defined and developed a new process and associated maintenance model, Inverse Software Configuration Management (ISCM). This model centres on a layered approach to the program comprehension process through the definition of a number of software configuration abstractions. This information together with the set of rules for reclaiming the information is stored within an Extensible System Information Base (ESIB) via, die definition of a Programming-in-the- Environment (PITE) language, the Inverse Configuration Description Language (ICDL). In order to assist the application of the ISCM process across a wide range of software applications and system architectures, die PISCES (Proforma Identification Scheme for Configurations of Existing Systems) method has been developed as a series of defined procedures and guidelines. To underpin the method and to offer a user-friendly interface to the process a series of templates, the Proforma Increasing Complexity Series (PICS) has been developed. To enable the useful employment of these techniques on large-scale systems, the subject of automation has been addressed through the development of a flexible meta-CASE environment, the PISCES M4 (MultiMedia Maintenance Manager) system. Of particular interest within this environment is the provision of a multimedia user interface (MUI) to die maintenance process. As a means of evaluating the PISCES method and to provide feedback into die ISCM process a number of practical applications have been modelled. In summary, this research has considered a number of concepts some of which are innovative in themselves, others of which are used in an innovative manner. In combination these concepts may be considered to considerably advance the knowledge and understanding of die comprehension process during the maintenance of legacy software systems. A number of publications have already resulted from the research and several more are in preparation. Additionally a number of areas for further study have been identified some of which are already underway as funded research and development projects

Proceedings of the Workshop on the Reuse of Web based Information

The proceedings are currently available online at: http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~vercoust/REUSE/WWW7-reuse.html where individual papers can be downloaded. However, this URL must not be regarded as permanent.These are the Proceeding of theWorkshop on the Reuse of Web Information that was held in conjunction with the Seventh International World Wide Web Conference, Brisbane, 14 April 19998