ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟ ΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣ ΙΤΕ 11/5/20051 Information design for cultural documentation Chryssoula Bekiari 1, Panos Constantopoulos 1,2, Martin Doerr 1 1

11/5/2005 1

ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ

Information design for cultural documentation

Chryssoula Bekiari1, Panos Constantopoulos1,2, Martin Doerr1

1 Institute of Computer Science, FORTH2 Athens University of Economics and Business

DELOS Workshop on

Digital Repositories: Interoperability and Common Services

Heraklion, Crete, 11-13/5/2005

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Digital cultural inventory

Cultural goodsPhysical and informational objects

Digitization• Document and image scanning

• Digital photography

• Conversion of analog audio and video recordings

• Digital transcription

Digital surrogates

Born digital cultural objects

Digital information recordings

Digital cultural inventory

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Virtually unified digital space

• Generated by virtue of the capability for unified access to independent digital collections

• Value multiplier• Realization conditions

– syntactic and semantic interoperability

• Preservation– procedures, metadata

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Creating a Greek digital cultural inventory

• Current main framework

“Information Society” Operational Programme, Measure 1.3 • Highlights of previous actions

• “POLEMON” National Monuments Record System • “MUSE” and “ARISTIDES” systems, Peloponnesian Ethnographic

Foundation • “POLYDEUKES” term thesaurus, Ministry of Culture, on-going • Byzantine monuments recording system, European Centre for Byzantine and

Post-byzantine Monuments• Historical documents management system, Vikelea Library • Open access thematic databases, Foundation for the Hellenic World (e.g.,

genealogies, Olympic Games, Greek History, etc.)

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Challenges

• Expected results:– Very large aggregate digital material

– Infastructures

– Organizational and technical experiences

• Challenges:– Massiveness and decentralization

– Most institutions involved lack adequate experience

– Heterogeneity (organizational and informational)

• Criteria – quality indices:– validity, accuracy and completeness of data

– ease of access

– interoperability of the various information repositories

– preservability of the inventory

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Support actions

Develop a common set of general guidelines for the design and implementation of digitization and documentation projects, and for promoting common practices.

• Digitization methods and procedures • Organization, integration and preservation of information• Web design and educational applications • Intellectual property rights management

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The FORTH-ICS project

• Objective: Develop a guide for designing and applying information structures for cultural documentation and for supporting the preservation and interoperability of digital information

• Unit in charge: Centre for Cultural Informatics • Project leader: Prof. Panos Constantopoulos• Editors: Chryssoula Bekiari, Panos Constantopoulos, Martin Doerr

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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ Content and contribution

• Focus: Interoperability• Approach: Employ common ontological layer• Results:

– Normative framework: recommendations and suggestions for conformance with standards and guidelines

– Documentation: a family of digital record types with respective XML DTDs to support

• recording, description and conservation of physical and informational objects• Digital preservation• Publication of digital material

– Interoperability: Guidelines for applying • an ontology for cultural documentation • technologies and standards for interoperability, information resource access • technologies and standards for terminology management

• Novelty: – A new, comprehensive, common XML DTD for moveable objects and

site monuments compatible with the ontology provided by the CIDOC CRM.

– First edition of CIDOC CRM (ISO/DIS 21127) in Greek.

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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ Documentation: from objects to data

recording,description

digitization

physical and informational

objects

digital repositories

recording,description

data (digital)

metadatadigital

surrogates

recordsphotosdesigns

analog recordings...

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General structure of an object documentation record• Record identification

Metadata concerning the record as a digital object in itself.

• Object identification The minimum data necessary to identify the object and uniquely refer to it

independently from any particular context.

• Scientific documentation – Description of the object as it is in our hands

Classifications, physical constituency and condition, symbolic content, etc.

– History of the object as reported by witnesses or inferred from traces and evidence

Descriptions of events and activities, such as construction, use, discovery, conservation, etc., in which the object took part.

– Associations of the object with other objects (e.g., similarity) and events.

• AdministrationData pertaining to the current handling of the object in a museum or collection,

e.g. acquisition, location, exhibition, loan, etc., and which may later be regarded as relevant to the object history or not.

• ReferencesMetadata about sources of documentation and related bibliography.

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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ Nature of documentation data - 1

They describe • Entities

– Physical: the object being documented and, possibly, others related to it. – Conceptual: they appear in the context of their relation to the object

being documented.

• Events– Determined by their kind, persons, organizations and objects involved in

specific roles, their limits in place and time, and constituency from other sub-events.

– An important specialization of events are activities, which are further characterized by actor, purpose and technique.

– Events are only recorded in the context of their relationship to the object being documented.

• Associations– Represent comparisons between objects (e.g. similarity) or cultural

context (e.g. joint use of objects, depiction or copy making, witness).

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Nature of documentation data - 2

Temporal validity• permanent : unlimited validity• volatile : limited over a specific time interval

– data should normally be tagged with their validity time

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Nature of documentation data - 3

Information in a record as a set of logical propositions• May refer to

– specific situations or occurrences • the pen with which Eleftherios Venizelos signed the Protocol of the Sevres

Convention• the necklace worn by Queen Amalia on her wedding

– categories• wedding dress, flag carried in the battlefield, clay pot

• May convey– part of the history of a particular object

– a frame of hypotheses about part of the history of an object, which refers to categories of events and other entities

– categorical knowledge, i.e. knowledge about the kinds of objects and events, not about a particular object

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Information patterns

• Information of the same nature may be contained in– different parts of an object record

– different records even concerning objects of different kinds • e.g. time, place, object composition, event, etc.

• Information patterns: specializable types of information units• Designing documentation records

– Reduced to designing a set of information patterns and a general, flexible record structure

– Design and conformance with relevant standards much better controlled

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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ Examples of information patterns

Date from until

Object composition number of parts part name kind code or cardinal number

Chronology within throughout cultural period social time justification

Place name code cadastral number kind geopolitical hierarchy address coordinates values reference point precision of measurement geodesic coordinate system link to design

Dating chronology time measurement value method laboratory

Event name kind chronology place description persons involved organizations involved objects involved comprises events

Person name biographical data communication data role / capacity / social group

Organization title legal address communication data department role / capacity / social group

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Data entry

• Naturally follows the sequence of object handling acts, but certain autonomy of the data entry process is desirable

• Data entry rule– necessary value omission disallowed

– compulsory value must be entered if it exists and is known

– optional

– Favours breadth over depth

• Value uncertainty– Conventional policy: least binding

• Date ‘unknown’ or ‘before 1900 AD’

– Effective policy: most precise values within the limits of the documenter’s knowledge

• A personal computer of unknown production date could be safely dated ‘after 1980 AD’

• Value multiplicity : multiple values by default, unique if specified

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Object record types

• In practice desirable to have a controlled variety of records thus supporting uniform documentation practices.

• Criteria for record type definition:

Intended use Object type

registrationdescription administrationconservationdigital preservationpublication of digital material

site monumentsmoveable objectstext documentsaudiopictures (still, moving)digital surrogatesinherently digital objects

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Integration of the digital cultural inventory

• The digital cultural inventory is required to:– remain available and safe despite future failures of equipment or

technological changes (preservation objective)

– support integrated access and use (integration objective)

• Economic dependencies:– preservation : costs of recovery, re-creation and permanent loss of

information

– integration : costs of access and re-use of distributed and heterogeneous information

• Decisive technical factors:– portability across platforms

– data and system interoperability among repositories

– Web access Syntactic and semantic interoperability

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Syntactic interoperability

• Common external data represenations• Individual repositories maintain the freedom to use different

encodings for internal representation and processing • XML

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Semantic interoperability

• Employ a common conceptual model in formulating semantic descriptions of objects and digital resources to support uniform access to them

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Semantic interoperability

<tag1> <tag2> <tag3></tag1>

<tag1> <tag2> <tag3></tag1>

ontology

digital resources

semanticresource

descriptions

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Ontology for semantic interoperability

• ICOM/CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, ISO/CD 21127.– An ontology for the cultural domain, which formally describes the concepts

and relations involved in cultural documentation

– Provides a common base for the interpretation of various forms of documentation

– Does not dictate the documentation elements

• Use of the ontology: – framework for designing information structures for documentation systems

– communication medium, at the semantic level, between heterogeneous systems

• CIDOC CRM plays an indispensable role in building an integrated digital cultural inventory.

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ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣΙΤΕ Conclusion

• An approach to developing and employing information structures for cultural documentation and for the integration and preservation of a digital cultural inventory aiming at long-term validity and exploitation.

• Dual strategy– propose specific standard (meta)data structures for specific application

areas

– all those structures are related to the common core ontology of the CIDOC CRM, which provides semantic interoperability in the long term

• Finding aids, such as Dublin Core, can be incorporated at schema level.

Documents

ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟ ΠΛΗΡΟΦΟΡΙΚΗΣ ΙΤΕ 11/5/20051 Information design for cultural documentation Chryssoula Bekiari 1, Panos Constantopoulos 1,2, Martin Doerr 1 1