Representing archaeological uncertainty in cultural informatics

This thesis sets out to explore, describe, quantify, and visualise uncertainty in a cultural informatics context, with a focus on archaeological reconstructions. For quite some time, archaeologists and heritage experts have been criticising the often toorealistic appearance of three-dimensional reconstructions. They have been highlighting one of the unique features of archaeology: the information we have on our heritage will always be incomplete. This incompleteness should be reflected in digitised reconstructions of the past. This criticism is the driving force behind this thesis. The research examines archaeological theory and inferential process and provides insight into computer visualisation. It describes how these two areas, of archaeology and computer graphics, have formed a useful, but often tumultuous, relationship through the years. By examining the uncertainty background of disciplines such as GIS, medicine, and law, the thesis postulates that archaeological visualisation, in order to mature, must move towards archaeological knowledge visualisation. Three sequential areas are proposed through this thesis for the initial exploration of archaeological uncertainty: identification, quantification and modelling. The main contributions of the thesis lie in those three areas. Firstly, through the innovative design, distribution, and analysis of a questionnaire, the thesis identifies the importance of uncertainty in archaeological interpretation and discovers potential preferences among different evidence types. Secondly, the thesis uniquely analyses and evaluates, in relation to archaeological uncertainty, three different belief quantification models. The varying ways that these mathematical models work, are also evaluated through simulated experiments. Comparison of results indicates significant convergence between the models. Thirdly, a novel approach to archaeological uncertainty and evidence conflict visualisation is presented, influenced by information visualisation schemes. Lastly, suggestions for future semantic extensions to this research are presented through the design and development of new plugins to a search engine

Uncertainty in archaeological reconstructions: A 3D gaming approach

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Uncertainty in archaeological reconstructions: A 3D gaming approach

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ARCO - Augmented Representation for Cultural Objects.

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Multimodal Interface for Safe Presentation of Valuable Objects

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ARCOlite — an XML based system for building and presenting virtual museums using Web3D and augmented reality

This paper describes ARCOLite, our low cost XML based client-server architecture for building and presenting digital heritage content in virtual museums. Our system includes components for creation and refinement of virtual artefacts including virtual reconstruction of buildings; XML content management, XML technologies for content repositories and presentation; and content visualisation using Web3D, virtual and augmented reality

Influencing Factors on the Visualisation of Archaeological Uncertainty

Summarization: This paper presents further work on a 3D visualisation system for the reconstruction of historical structures which takes into account archaeological uncertainty. The uncertainty associated with an archaeologist's interpretation is represented using possibility theory and visualised by shader-based information visualisation schemes. An increase or decrease in uncertainty is influenced by any related evidence recovered; we define this evidence as 'influencing factors'. Different types of archaeological evidence were identified after discussions with several archaeologists. To understand the individual importance of each influencing factor on an interpretation, we analysed data derived from formal questionnaires distributed to a selected group of archaeologists equally divided between Roman and non-Roman specialists. They were asked questions ranging from the wider perception of uncertainty to more specific ones on the identified types of archaeological evidence. We describe the stages involved in designing the questions, the process of gathering data and feedback from archaeologists, and the results themselves. Results suggest that specific evidence types are considered more favourably than others.Παρουσιάστηκε στο: 8th International conference on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Intelligent Cultural Heritag