ArCo: the Italian Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph

ArCo is the Italian Cultural Heritage knowledge graph, consisting of a network of seven vocabularies and 169 million triples about 820 thousand cultural entities. It is distributed jointly with a SPARQL endpoint, a software for converting catalogue records to RDF, and a rich suite of documentation material (testing, evaluation, how-to, examples, etc.). ArCo is based on the official General Catalogue of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBAC) - and its associated encoding regulations - which collects and validates the catalogue records of (ideally) all Italian Cultural Heritage properties (excluding libraries and archives), contributed by CH administrators from all over Italy. We present its structure, design methods and tools, its growing community, and delineate its importance, quality, and impact

Evaluation of semantic web ontologies for modelling art collections

© 2017, Springer International Publishing AG. The need for organising, sharing and digitally processing Cultural Heritage (CH) information has led to the development of formal knowledge representation models (ontologies) for the CH domain. Based on RDF and OWL, the standard data model and ontology language of the Semantic Web, ontologies such as CIDOC-CRM, the Europeana Data Model and VRA, offer enhanced representation capabilities, but also support for inference, querying and interlinking through the Web. This paper presents the results of a small-scale evaluation of the three most commonly used CH ontologies, with respect to their capacity to fulfil the data modelling requirements of art collections

Contemporary art in the museum; responsibilities and professional roles of care

This thesis investigates the professional roles responsible for perpetuating contemporary artworks, using the term “perpetuation” to refer to a holistic preservation of the integral components (material and/or immaterial) of an artwork over time. A contemporary artwork is re-enacted differently between exhibitions: materials are replaced, time-based media equipment and formats are changed and spatial arrangements are altered. A work can start as a performance and over the years develop into an object, or vice versa. There is change to be prevented and change to be cherished; every artwork has its own rules, and there are even cases where these rules are meant to be altered over time. Contemporary art, as sociologist Nathalie Heinich has argued, constitutes a new paradigm of art, distinct from traditional and modern. Contemporary artworks transgress conventional barriers, are highly idiosyncratic, and have a disposition to embrace change. As a result, the identity and ontology of a contemporary artwork are not self-evident, leading to a requirement of extensive and thorough research and documentation of the artist’s intent, as well as of the artwork’s institutional life. This requirement has proven challenging to institutions. Through literature review, a field-study and 27 semi-structured expert interviews, this thesis seeks to investigate the ways in which this requirement challenges traditional museum roles, namely, conservators and curators. It concludes that this demanding requirement posed by contemporary artworks is difficult to be fulfilled when added as a peripheral responsibility to the many primary responsibilities conservators and curators have. The thesis proposes the establishment of a new museum role: a collaborator to conservators and curators; a researcher with the role of understanding and documenting the identity and ontology of a contemporary artwork, tracing the artist’s intent, as well as the rationale of institutional decision-making — supporting a clear, effective and well-documented reflection back and forth from the archive to the exhibition space.Esta tese investiga aqueles que são responsáveis pela perpetuação de obras de arte contemporâneas. Utilizando o termo “perpetuação” refere-se a uma preservação holística das componentes integrais (materiais e/ou imateriais) de uma obra de arte ao longo do tempo. Uma obra de arte contemporânea é reencenada de forma distinta em cada exposição: os materiais são substituídos, os formatos e equipamentos são alterados e as suas disposições espaciais vão variando. Uma obra pode começar como uma performance e ao longo dos anos evoluir para um objeto, ou vice-versa. Algumas alterações devem serem evitadas, outras devem ser acolhidas; cada obra de arte tem suas próprias regras, e há até casos em que essas regras devem ser alteradas ao longo do tempo. Tal como argumentou a socióloga Nathalie Heinich, a arte contemporânea constitui um novo paradigma de arte distinto do tradicional e do moderno. As obras de arte contemporâneas transgridem barreiras convencionais, são altamente idiossincráticas e têm uma disposição para abraçar a mudança. Assim, a identidade e a ontologia de uma obra contemporânea não são auto-evidentes, o que leva a que se deva exigir um trabalho de investigação e de documentação extenso e minucioso sobre as intenções do artista, bem como sobre a vida institucional da obra. Para os museus, esta exigência tem sido um desafio. Após a realização de uma revisão de literatura, de trabalho de campo e 27 entrevistas semiestruturadas com especialistas, esta tese procura investigar as formas pelas quais essa exigência afronta os papéis tradicionais dos museus, em particular as funções dos conservadores e curadores. Conclui-se que esta exigência imposta pelas obras de arte contemporâneas é difícil de ser cumprida, se for encarada como uma responsabilidade periférica e adicionada às muitas responsabilidades primárias que devem ser asseguradas por conservadores e curadores. A tese propõe que se institua um novo papel museológico: um colaborador de conservadores e curadores; um investigador que assuma as funções de compreender e documentar a identidade e a ontologia de uma obra contemporânea; alguém que faça um mapeamento sobre a intenção do artista, bem como sobre as razões que levam às decisões institucionais — a partir de uma reflexão clara, eficaz e bem documentada, desde o arquivo ao espaço expositivo

VISCOUNTH: A Large-Scale Multilingual Visual Question Answering Dataset for Cultural Heritage

Visual question answering has recently been settled as a fundamental multi-modal reasoning task of artificial intelligence that allows users to get information about visual content by asking questions in natural language. In the cultural heritage domain this task can contribute to assist visitors in museums and cultural sites, thus increasing engagement. However, the development of visual question answering models for cultural heritage is prevented by the lack of suitable large-scale datasets. To meet this demand, we built a large-scale heterogeneous and multilingual (Italian and English) dataset for cultural heritage that comprises approximately 500K Italian cultural assets and 6.5M question-answer pairs. We propose a novel formulation of the task that requires reasoning over both the visual content and an associated natural language description, and present baselines for this task. Results show that the current state of the art is reasonably effective, but still far from satisfactory, therefore further research is this area is recommended. Nonetheless, we also present a holistic baseline to address visual and contextual questions and foster future research on the topic

Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed

Editorial of Special Issue on Cultural Heritage and Semantic Web Technology

Non peer reviewe

Editorial of the Special issue on Cultural heritage and semantic web

[no abstract available