Methods for creating and using geospatio-temporal semantic web

This dissertation discusses the problems and the methods of creating and using ontologies in the area of digital cultural heritage. One of the problems is that content annotations in semantic cultural heritage portals commonly make spatiotemporal references to historical regions and places using names whose meanings are different in different times. For example, historical administrational regions such as countries, municipalities, and cities have been renamed, merged together, split into parts, and annexed or moved to and from other regions. The contribution of this dissertation to this problem is to develop methods which can be used to model, produce and utilize geospatio-temporal ontologies. The resources in geospatio-temporal ontologies can be used as annotation terms for describing content, and also for seeking information. The main point of this dissertation is to describe schemas, models and methods that produce and utilize a geospatio-temporal ontology. The schemas and the models are used as inputs for the methods. These methods generate identifiers for spatio-temporal instances, and also relationships between them. In this work, historical Finnish municipalities were modeled and geospatio-temporal descriptions for them created from a filled-up schema. Methods enriched the models by creating geospatio-temporal relationships between these temporal municipalities. The resulting collection of models are referred to as the Finnish Spatio-temporal Ontology (Suomen ajallinen paikkaontologia, SAPO). Specific relationships of the geo-spatiotemporal instances provided the basis for novel recommendation, data mining and visualization schemes. The results of the experiments were promising. For example, with the help of the ontology a user has the ability to retrieve also the content annotated to a historic region even if she searches using a contemporary name of the same or partially overlapping region. The work contributes also to modeling and reasoning about imprecise temporal intervals. A set of different measures based on analyzing two fuzzy temporal intervals are presented and evaluated in the work. The use of a combination of different measures for calculating relevance between temporal intervals was found out to perform best

Temporal hints in the cultural heritage discourse: what can an ontology of time as it is worded reveal?

International audienceTime is an indispensable component of cultural heritage (CH) information: implementing appropriate knowledge models carry crucial importance in order to provide deeper understanding of heritage elements' evolution, to uncover concurrences, and to weigh quality factors. It is a challenging task though due to the uncertain characteristics of temporal data, and to the wording of time in the CH discourse. Existing KR models are either not designed for these distinctive characteristics, or spatial aspects tend to upstage the temporal dimension.This research aims at deciphering and proposing a formal representation of the way temporal hints are formalized in historical narratives. An OWL temporal ontology is introduced that provides a core support mechanism allowing for a semantic representation of temporal statements, and for structural analysis. The objective is to facilitate the cross-examination of temporal hints in and across CH collections so that specialists can have extensive reading possibilities of heritage information.Dans le champ des sciences patrimoniales, la dimension temporelle de l’information joue un rôle à l’évidence majeur tant pour l’interpréter et l’analyser que pour relier des faits isolés. Mais la façon dont cette dimension est verbalisée pose des problèmes de formalisation non triviaux. Pourtant, cette verbalisation, que l’on associe souvent au terme-chapeau d’incertitude, peut être lue en dissociant d’une part le caractère «mal connu» d’un fait doc-umenté, irréductible, et les choix faits par le producteur de l’information pour la «relativiser».Dans cette contribution nous proposons un modèle formel permettant d’observer et d’analyser de façon systématique cette couche de verbalisation. L’expérience est menée sur des données fortement hétérogènes, souvent d’origine citoyenne, documentant le petit pat-rimoine matériel et immatériel. Ce cas d’étude est donc limité, mais il apparait néanmoins comme portant une question de fond allant au-delà du cas d’espèce.La contribution détaille d’abord la grille d’analyse d’indices temporels proposée, puis relate l’expérimentation concrète associée (ontologie OWL). Il n’est pas fait état d’une quelconque prétention à un résultat généralisable stricto sensu, mais cette expérience peut contribuer à nourrir de façon pragmatique un débat nécessaire sur la formalisation d’indices temporels dans les sciences historiques

Historical collaborative geocoding

The latest developments in digital have provided large data sets that can increasingly easily be accessed and used. These data sets often contain indirect localisation information, such as historical addresses. Historical geocoding is the process of transforming the indirect localisation information to direct localisation that can be placed on a map, which enables spatial analysis and cross-referencing. Many efficient geocoders exist for current addresses, but they do not deal with the temporal aspect and are based on a strict hierarchy (..., city, street, house number) that is hard or impossible to use with historical data. Indeed historical data are full of uncertainties (temporal aspect, semantic aspect, spatial precision, confidence in historical source, ...) that can not be resolved, as there is no way to go back in time to check. We propose an open source, open data, extensible solution for geocoding that is based on the building of gazetteers composed of geohistorical objects extracted from historical topographical maps. Once the gazetteers are available, geocoding an historical address is a matter of finding the geohistorical object in the gazetteers that is the best match to the historical address. The matching criteriae are customisable and include several dimensions (fuzzy semantic, fuzzy temporal, scale, spatial precision ...). As the goal is to facilitate historical work, we also propose web-based user interfaces that help geocode (one address or batch mode) and display over current or historical topographical maps, so that they can be checked and collaboratively edited. The system is tested on Paris city for the 19-20th centuries, shows high returns rate and is fast enough to be used interactively.Comment: WORKING PAPE

Information search in web archives

Tese de doutoramento, Informática (Engenharia Informática), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2014Web archives preserve information that was published on the web or digitized from printed publications. Many of that information is unique and historically valuable. However, users do not have dedicated tools to find the desired information, which hampers the usefulness of web archives. This dissertation investigates solutions towards the advance of web archive information retrieval (WAIR) and contributes to the increase of knowledge about its technology and users. The thesis underlying this work is that the search results can be improved by exploiting temporal information intrinsic to web archives. This temporal information was leveraged from two different angles. First, the long-term persistence of web documents was analyzed and modeled to better estimate their relevance to a query. Second, a temporal-dependent ranking framework that learns and combines ranking models specific for each period was devised. This approach contrasts with a typical single-model approach that ignores the variance of web characteristics over time. The proposed approach was empirically validated through various controlled experiments that demonstrated their superiority over the state-of-the-art in WAIR.Os arquivos da web preservam informação que foi publicada na web ou digitalizada de publicações impressas. Muita dessa informação é única e historicamente valiosa. Contudo, os utilizadores não dispõem de ferramentas dedicadas para encontrar a informação desejada, o que limita a utilidade dos arquivos da web. Esta dissertação investiga soluções para o avanço da recuperação de informação em arquivos da web (WAIR) e contribui para o aumento de conhecimento acerca da sua tecnologia e dos seus utilizadores. A tese subjacente a este trabalho é a de que os resultados de pesquisa podem ser melhorados através da exploração de informação temporal intrínseca aos arquivos da web. Esta informação temporal foi explorada de dois ângulos diferentes. Primeiro, a longa persistência dos documentos web foi analisada e modelada para melhor estimar a relevância destes em função da pesquisa. Segundo, foi concebido um enquadramento (framework) para ordenação de resultados dependente do tempo, que aprende e combina modelos específicos para cada período. Esta abordagem contrasta com a abordagem de um modelo único que ignora a variação das características da web ao longo do tempo. A abordagem proposta foi validada empiricamente através de várias experiências controladas que demonstraram a sua superioridade em relação ao estado da arte em WAIR

Spatial ontologies for architectural heritage

Informatics and artificial intelligence have generated new requirements for digital archiving, information, and documentation. Semantic interoperability has become fundamental for the management and sharing of information. The constraints to data interpretation enable both database interoperability, for data and schemas sharing and reuse, and information retrieval in large datasets. Another challenging issue is the exploitation of automated reasoning possibilities. The solution is the use of domain ontologies as a reference for data modelling in information systems. The architectural heritage (AH) domain is considered in this thesis. The documentation in this field, particularly complex and multifaceted, is well-known to be critical for the preservation, knowledge, and promotion of the monuments. For these reasons, digital inventories, also exploiting standards and new semantic technologies, are developed by international organisations (Getty Institute, ONU, European Union). Geometric and geographic information is essential part of a monument. It is composed by a number of aspects (spatial, topological, and mereological relations; accuracy; multi-scale representation; time; etc.). Currently, geomatics permits the obtaining of very accurate and dense 3D models (possibly enriched with textures) and derived products, in both raster and vector format. Many standards were published for the geographic field or in the cultural heritage domain. However, the first ones are limited in the foreseen representation scales (the maximum is achieved by OGC CityGML), and the semantic values do not consider the full semantic richness of AH. The second ones (especially the core ontology CIDOC – CRM, the Conceptual Reference Model of the Documentation Commettee of the International Council of Museums) were employed to document museums’ objects. Even if it was recently extended to standing buildings and a spatial extension was included, the integration of complex 3D models has not yet been achieved. In this thesis, the aspects (especially spatial issues) to consider in the documentation of monuments are analysed. In the light of them, the OGC CityGML is extended for the management of AH complexity. An approach ‘from the landscape to the detail’ is used, for considering the monument in a wider system, which is essential for analysis and reasoning about such complex objects. An implementation test is conducted on a case study, preferring open source applications

Computer Vision and Architectural History at Eye Level:Mixed Methods for Linking Research in the Humanities and in Information Technology

Information on the history of architecture is embedded in our daily surroundings, in vernacular and heritage buildings and in physical objects, photographs and plans. Historians study these tangible and intangible artefacts and the communities that built and used them. Thus valuableinsights are gained into the past and the present as they also provide a foundation for designing the future. Given that our understanding of the past is limited by the inadequate availability of data, the article demonstrates that advanced computer tools can help gain more and well-linked data from the past. Computer vision can make a decisive contribution to the identification of image content in historical photographs. This application is particularly interesting for architectural history, where visual sources play an essential role in understanding the built environment of the past, yet lack of reliable metadata often hinders the use of materials. The automated recognition contributes to making a variety of image sources usable forresearch.<br/

Mixing Methods: Practical Insights from the Humanities in the Digital Age

The digital transformation is accompanied by two simultaneous processes: digital humanities challenging the humanities, their theories, methodologies and disciplinary identities, and pushing computer science to get involved in new fields. But how can qualitative and quantitative methods be usefully combined in one research project? What are the theoretical and methodological principles across all disciplinary digital approaches? This volume focusses on driving innovation and conceptualising the humanities in the 21st century. Building on the results of 10 research projects, it serves as a useful tool for designing cutting-edge research that goes beyond conventional strategies