Semantic Representation and Location Provenance of Cultural Heritage Information: the National Gallery Collection in London

This paper describes a working example of semantically modelling cultural heritage information and data from the National Gallery collection in London. The paper discusses the process of semantically representing and enriching the available cultural heritage data, and reveals the challenges of semantically expressing interrelations and groupings among the physical items, the venue and the available digital resources. The paper also highlights the challenges in the creation of the conceptual model of the National Gallery as a Venue, which aims to i) describe and understand the correlation between the parts of a building and the whole; ii) to record and express the semantic relationships among the building components with the building as a whole; and iii) to be able to record the accurate location of objects within space and capture their provenance in terms of changes of location. The outcome of this research is the CrossCult venue ontology, a fully International Committee for Documentation Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM) compliant structure developed in the context of the CrossCult project. The proposed ontology attempts to model the spatial arrangements of the different types of cultural heritage venues considered in the project: from small museums to open air archaeological sites and whole cities

CrossCult D2.4 Refined digital cultural resource data & data structure

This report presents the CrossCult digital datasets of the four project pilots.It contains a description of the methods and data structures used to semantically model and ingest the digital resources of the pilots into the CrossCult Knowledge Base following the semantics of the CrossCult Upper-level ontology, a set of examples of semantic enrichment, information retrieval and association discovery among the pilots’ resources and other related information in the CrossCult Knowledge Base,and a brief description of how the pilots’ digital resources can be viewed and access through three different front-end application

CrossCult D2.5 Upper-level Cultural Heritage Ontology

This paper presents the Upper-level Ontology and the other ontological schemas and vocabularies that we used to model the semantics of the “world” of CrossCult and its four pilots. It consists of two documents: a report describing the rationale and structure of the ontology and a PDF file containing the definitions of the classes and properties of the CrossCult ontologies in the syntax of Description Logics

Technology-Powered Strategies to Rethink the Pedagogy of History and Cultural Heritage through Symmetries and Narratives

Recent advances in semantic web and deep learning technologies enable new means for the computational analysis of vast amounts of information from the field of digital humanities. We discuss how some of the techniques can be used to identify historical and cultural symmetries between different characters, locations, events or venues, and how these can be harnessed to develop new strategies to promote intercultural and cross-border aspects that support the teaching and learning of history and heritage. The strategies have been put to the test in the context of the European project CrossCult, revealing enormous potential to encourage curiosity to discover new information and increase retention of learned information

D2.1 Crosscult Pilot Specifications

The report presents a collaborative effort of the four pilots, which took place in the first six months (M1-M6) of the project and focused on: 1) refining the original scenarios, 2) capturing the requirements, 3) defining the evaluation framework, 4) identifying the contributing technologies, 5) specifying the core gameplay for the four pilots and 6) outlining the ethical guidelines for experts

Cognitive-based visualization of semantically structured cultural heritage data

We present preliminary findings regarding the increasing use of Info-Vis tools and semantically structured data by cultural heritage institutions. This sector faces a number of challenges in developing best practices for publishing Linked Data, including the presentation of their digital cultural heritage collections and the visualization of their multidimensional hidden histories. We suggest that, as these institutions' interest in Semantic Web technologies grows and associated applications are more widely adopted, the need to provide InfoVis tools for efficient overview and exploration of cultural data increases. We postulate that changes in the paradigms for interaction with cultural datasets are also needed, with more focus on users' needs and cognitive processes. We suggest that by taking into account human information processes, better cognitive support can be introduced via InfoVis tools for Linked Data, thus reducing the cognitive load experienced by users

Towards a Cognitive Based Framework for Evaluating Information Visualisation Tools as tools for Learning

Information Visualisation (InfoVis) is defined as the interactive visual representation of abstract data. We view the end-users’ interaction with InfoVis tools as a learning experience which is made up of a set of highly demanding cognitive activities. These activities assist the end-user in making sense and gaining knowledge of the represented domain. There is a consensus in the InfoVis community about the importance of user evaluation studies in measuring the effectiveness of InfoVis tools. However, usability studies, which are most commonly used in this domain, are not appropriate for capturing the end-user cognitive processes that occur during the learning experience. To address this issue this paper discusses work in progress in developing a cognitive based framework for evaluating the effectiveness of InfoVis tools on the user learning process, by employing metrics for measuring the peoples ability to remember, understand, analyse, and derive insights from the visualised data, applied in the Cultural Heritage domain

Semantic Representation and Enrichment of Cultural Heritage Information for Fostering Reinterpretation and Reflection on the European History

The potential of the digital world for generating new ways of engaging with cultural heritage information has been documented in the literature over the past 20 years. The modern advances of digital technologies provide a wider access to information, and enable new ways of interacting with and understanding of cultural heritage information, facilitating its presentation, access and reinterpretation [4]. Ensuring that the growth of available cultural heritage information is mutually interoperable so that it can be searched, linked and presented in a harmonised way across the boundaries of datasets and data silos remains though a fundamental problem [3]. This paper describes a working example of connecting and mapping distant cultural heritage resources available across cultural heritage institutions and venues though an open technological platform

3-Keto steroids from the marine organisms Dendrophyllia cornigera and Cymodocea nodosa

The new (20R)-22E-cholesta-4,22-diene-3,6-dione (1), along with three known 3-keto steroids were isolated from the deep-water Mediterranean scleractinian coral Dendrophyllia cornigera (2-4). Moreover, four known related 3-keto steroids were isolated from the sea grass Cymodocea nodosa (5-8). The structure elucidation of steroid 1 and the full NMR resonance assignments of all isolated metabolites were based on interpretation of their spectral data. All compounds are reported for the first time as metabolites of the investigated organisms. Compounds 2 and 3 showed significant cytotoxicity against lung cancer NSCLC-N6 cell line. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Inferring Art Preferences from Gaze Exploration in a Museum

International audienceThis paper is a first step towards identifying the links between the characteristics of gaze behaviour and visitor preferences in a museum. In the long term, the real-time analysis of visitors' gaze should allow a fine estimation of their interest for the different artworks exhibited and should replace the fastidious and time-consuming elicitation of preferences commonly used in traditional recommender systems. To study these links, we carried out a user study at the Nancy Museum of Fine Arts in the North-East of France. This pilot study involved 13 volunteers who had the opportunity to freely explore the museum and contemplate hundreds of artworks for more than 50 minutes on average in May 2018. We were able to analyze millions of fixation points so as to find correlations between the number of fixation points per painting, the time spent looking at a painting, and whether or not this painting is appreciated. We plan to extend this study to 100 visitors in the coming months