Cultural Heritage on the Semantic Web: from Representation to Fruition
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Universita` degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca QUA SI Project PhD Program in Information Society XXII Ciclo - I Anno Accademico 2008–2009 CULTURAL HERITAGE ON THE SEMANTIC WEB: FROM REPRESENTATION TO FRUITION Glauco Mantegari Ph.D. Dissertation Advisor: Prof. Stefania Bandini Contents 1 Introduction3 1.1 Research Perspective and Objectives . .5 1.2 Outline of the Dissertation . .7 2 1.0 to n.0: New Directions in the Development of the Web 11 2.1 The “Web 2.0” . 11 2.2 Towards the “Web 3.0” . 14 2.3 Beyond 2.0 and 3.0: The Emerging Key Elements . 18 2.3.1 User Generated Content . 18 2.3.2 Combining Applications: From APIs to Mashups . 22 2.3.3 The Web of Data and the Semantic Web . 25 2.4 The Enabling Technologies: An Overview . 29 2.4.1 XML Technologies: Enabling Syntactic Interoperability . 30 2.4.2 APIs and Web Services . 31 2.4.3 Mashup Development: Strategies and Techniques . 34 2.4.4 Towards Semantics . 38 3 The Semantic Web, Cultural Heritage and Archaeology 47 3.1 The Semantic Web in Cultural Heritage . 47 3.1.1 ARTISTE - SCULPTEUR - eCHASE . 48 3.1.2 MultimediaN E-Culture - CHIP Browser . 49 3.1.3 Museum Finland - Culture Sampo . 53 3.1.4 Contexta SR . 57 3.2 The Semantic Web in Archaeology . 58 3.2.1 Vbi Erat Lvpa . 59 3.2.2 STAR . 60 3.2.3 The Port Networks Project . 61 3.2.4 Other Projects . 63 3.3 Around and Beyond the Semantic Web . 64 3.3.1 Digital Libraries . 65 3.3.2 E-Science and Cyberinfrastructure . 67 4 From Representation to Fruition: An Interdisciplinary Research Perspective 73 4.1 Initial Remarks . 73 4.1.1 Defining a Research Approach . 78 4.2 From Representation . 80 4.2.1 Core Domain Ontologies: The CIDOC CRM Approach . 83 4.2.2 The CIDOC CRM in Use . 84 4.3 . to Fruition: Retrieving Information through Fuzzy Chronologies . 92 I CONTENTS 4.3.1 Archaeological Chronologies: A General Overview . 93 4.3.2 Related Work . 97 4.3.3 A New Approach Based on Fuzzy Sets . 105 5 MANTIC: The Archaeology of Milan on the Semantic Web 111 5.1 The Milano Antica Project . 111 5.2 MANTIC: a Semantic Portal for Milano Antica ................ 113 5.3 Selection of Relevant Data Sources . 115 5.3.1 SIRBeC . 117 5.3.2 IDRA . 120 5.3.3 MANTIC . 120 5.4 Conceptual Mapping to the CIDOC CRM . 121 5.4.1 SIRBeC Mapping . 122 5.4.2 IDRA Mapping . 130 5.4.3 MANTIC Mapping . 134 5.5 Discussion . 137 5.5.1 General Considerations . 137 5.5.2 Defining Event-Based Mapping Chains: Issues and Challenges . 142 5.5.3 Representing Actual Instance Data Values . 148 5.5.4 Managing Vocabularies . 149 5.5.5 Coreference Linking . 152 6 ChronoMANTIC: Representing and Retrieving Fuzzy Chronologies 155 6.1 MANTIC Chronologies . 155 6.1.1 References to Absolute Chronology . 156 6.1.2 References to Historical or Archaeological Periods . 158 6.2 Representing Fuzzy Temporal Intervals . 159 6.2.1 Determining Fuzzy Temporal Intervals from Label Information . 159 6.2.2 Representing Fuzzy Temporal Intervals for Historical and Ar- chaeological Periods . 162 6.3 Evaluation Setting and Criteria . 164 6.3.1 An Interface for the Evaluation . 165 6.4 Results . 168 6.4.1 Defining the Weights for Relevance Measure . 168 6.4.2 Analyzing Precision and Recall . 168 6.5 Discussion . 170 6.5.1 The Model . 170 6.5.2 The Retrieval Method . 173 II CONTENTS 7 DemoMANTIC: Design and Development of a Prototype System 175 7.1 Previous Work: The MANTIC 1.0 System . 175 7.1.1 System Architecture . 177 7.1.2 Browsing Functionalities . 178 7.1.3 Towards a Semantic Web System . 178 7.2 Semantic Repositories: General Remarks . 180 7.2.1 The Framework Sub-System . 181 7.2.2 The Triplestore Sub-System . 181 7.2.3 The Reasoner Sub-System . 182 7.2.4 Technological Survey . 183 7.2.5 Evaluation . 185 7.3 The MANTIC 2.0 Architecture . 186 7.4 Concluding Remarks . 190 8 Concluding Remarks and Future Directions 193 A Appendix: The Mapping Templates 199 III List of Figures 2.1 A schema representing the difference between the Web of Documents and the Web of Data. 16 2.2 An example of User Generated Content in Google Earth. 21 2.3 A schema representing different types of mashup. 24 2.4 Numbers of mashups available in ProgrammableWeb.com in the semester from July 2008 to January 2009. 25 2.5 Types of mashups available in ProgrammableWeb.com. 26 2.6 The Linking Open Data dataset “cloud”. 28 2.7 An example XML structure and its representation as a graph. 30 2.8 Protocol usage by APIs. 32 2.9 Schema of a REST service. 33 2.10 Schema of a SOAP envelope. 33 2.11 The traditional model for Web applications compared to the Ajax model. 35 2.12 An example of the Yahoo Pipes visual editor. 37 2.13 The Semantic Web pile. 39 2.14 URI, URL, and URN. 40 2.15 The structure of an RDF statement. 40 2.16 An example of an RDF graph. 41 2.17 An example showing a scenario where knowledge can be inferred start- ing from RDFS constructs and an RDF statement. 43 3.1 The MultimediaN E-Culture data cloud. 51 3.2 The architecture of the MultimediaN E-Culture Demonstrator. 52 3.3 The architecture of MuseumFinland on the server side. 55 3.4 The proposed Portus ontology. 63 3.5 A tree-tier framework for the Digital Library Universe. 66 3.6 A general schema of integrated cyberinfrastructure services. 70 3.7 A model of a cyberinfrastructure for archaeology. 71 4.1 Cultural heritage: from representation to fruition. 75 4.2 The basic mapping schema proposed by Kondylakis. 88 4.3 An example of both graph and tabular representation of the mappings to the CIDOC CRM. 89 4.4 CIDOC CRM available serializations. 90 4.5 A representation of the dating and duration properties. 95 4.6 An example of deposition events as meetings. 97 4.7 Determinacy and indeterminacy temporal intervals according to the CIDOC CRM. 98 4.8 A schema of relevant classes and properties for temporal representation in the CIDOC CRM and the Erlangen CRM. 101 V LIST OF FIGURES 4.9 The CIDOC CRM implementation of Allen’s relationships between tem- poral intervals. 102 4.10 CIDOC CRM temporal properties of the E52 Time-Span class. 103 4.11 The CIDOC CRM and Erlangen CRM representation of fuzzy temporal intervals. 104 4.12 The period “from the beginning of the 1st century B.C. to the first half of the 1st century A.D.” represented as a fuzzy temporal interval. 107 4.13 A fuzzy temporal interval “Pre-Roman Age” and its intersection with another fuzzy temporal interval “Roman Age”. 108 5.1 Excavations of the Santa Tecla basilica in the central area of the city in 1961. 112 5.2 Archaeological excavations in Milan: photos posted by a Flickr user. 116 5.3 A polygon related to archaeological features of Milan on Wikimapia . 116 5.4 A general schema of the SIRBeC cataloging process. 119 5.5 A graph representing the main activities identified in SIRBeC. 124 5.6 The production of artifacts in SIRBeC and the corresponding graph in CIDOC CRM. 125 5.7 The discovery of artifacts in SIRBeC and the corresponding graph in CIDOC CRM. ..