Artiste is a European project developing a cross-collection search system for art galleries and museums. It combines image content retrieval with text based retrieval and uses RDF mappings in order to integrate diverse databases. The test sites of the Louvre, Victoria and Albert Museum, Uffizi Gallery and National Gallery London provide their own database schema for existing metadata, avoiding the need for migration to a common schema. The system will accept a query based on one museumÔÇÖs fields and convert them, through an RDF mapping into a form suitable for querying the other collections. The nature of some of the image processing algorithms means that the system can be slow for some computations, so the system is session-based to allow the user to return to the results later. The system has been built within a J2EE/EJB framework, using the Jboss Enterprise Application Server.
Secondary Title
WWW2002: The Eleventh International World Wide Web Conference
Publisher
International World Wide Web Conference Committee
ISBN
1-880672-20-0
Critical Arguements
CA "A key aim is to make a unified retrieval system which is targeted to usersÔÇÖ real requirements and which is usable with integrated cross-collection searching. Museums and Galleries often have several digital collections ranging from public access images to specialised scientific images used for conservation purposes. Access from one gallery to another was not common in terms of textual data and not done at all in terms of image-based queries. However the value of cross-collection access is recognised as important for example in comparing treatments and conditions of paintings. While ARTISTE is primarily designed for inter-museum searching it could equally be applied to museum intranets. Within a MuseumÔÇÖs intranet there may be systems which are not interlinked due to local management issues."
Conclusions
RQ "The query language for this type of system is not yet standardised but we hope that an emerging standard will provide the session-based connectivity this application seems to require due to the possibility of long query times." ... "In the near future, the project will be introducing controlled vocabulary support for some of the metadata fields. This will not only make retrieval more robust but will also facilitate query expansion. The LouvreÔÇÖs multilingual thesaurus will be used in order to ensure greater interoperability. The system is easily extensible to other multimedia types such as audio and video (eg by adding additional query items such as "dialog" and "video sequence" with appropriate analysers). A follow-up project is scheduled to explore this further. There is some scope for relating our RDF query format to the emerging query standards such as XQuery and we also plan to feed our experience into standards such as the ZNG initiative.
SOW
DC "The Artiste project is a European Commission funded collaboration, investigating the use of integrated content and metadata-based image retrieval across disparate databases in several major art galleries across Europe. Collaborating galleries include the Louvre in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the National Gallery in London." ... "Artiste is funded by the European CommunityÔÇÖs Framework 5 programme. The partners are: NCR, The University of Southampton, IT Innovation, Giunti Multimedia, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The National Gallery, The research laboratory of the museums of France (C2RMF) and the Uffizi Gallery. We would particularly like to thank our collaborators Christian Lahanier, James Stevenson, Marco Cappellini, John Cupitt, Raphaela Rimabosci, Gert Presutti, Warren Stirling, Fabrizio Giorgini and Roberto Vacaro."
