Information design for cultural documentation

1
Information design for cultural documentation

• Chryssoula Bekiari1, Panos Constantopoulos1,2,
  Martin Doerr1
• 1 Institute of Computer Science, FORTH
• 2 Athens University of Economics and Business
• DELOS Workshop on
• Digital Repositories Interoperability and Common
  Services
• Heraklion, Crete, 11-13/5/2005

2
Digital cultural inventory

• Cultural goods
• Physical 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

3
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

4
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• Historical documents management system, Vikelea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.)

5
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

6
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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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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Documentation from objects to data
physical and informational objects
data (digital)
recording, description
records photos designs analog recordings ...
digital repositories
digitization
metadata
digital surrogates
recording, description
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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.
• Administration
• Data 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.
• References
• Metadata about sources of documentation and
  related bibliography.

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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

15
Examples of information patterns
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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 documenters knowledge
• A personal computer of unknown production date
  could be safely dated after 1980 AD
• Value multiplicity multiple values by default,
  unique if specified

17
Object record types

• In practice desirable to have a controlled
  variety of records thus supporting uniform
  documentation practices.
• Criteria for record type definition

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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
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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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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.