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."
Type
Electronic Journal
Title
ARTISTE: An integrated Art Analysis and Navigation Environment
This article focuses on the description of the objectives of the ARTISTE project (for "An integrated Art Analysis and Navigation environment") that aims at building a tool for the intelligent retrieval and indexing of high resolution images. The ARTISTE project will address professional users in the fine arts as the primary end-user base. These users provide services for the ultimate end-user, the citizen.
Critical Arguements
CA "European museums and galleries are rich in cultural treasures but public access has not reached its full potential. Digital multimedia can address these issues and expand the accessible collections. However, there is a lack of systems and techniques to support both professional and citizen access to these collections."
Phrases
<P1> New technology is now being developed that will transform that situation. A European consortium, partly funded by the EU under the fifth R&D framework, is working to produce a new management system for visual information. <P2> Four major European galleries (The Uffizi in Florence, The National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Louvre related restoration centre, Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Mus├®es de France) are involved in the project. They will be joining forces with NCR, a leading player in database and Data Warehouse technology; Interactive Labs, the new media design and development facility of Italy's leading art publishing group, Giunti; IT Innovation, Web-based system developers; and the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Together they will create web based applications and tools for the automatic indexing and retrieval of high-resolution art images by pictorial content and information. <P3> The areas of innovation in this project are as follows: Using image content analysis to automatically extract metadata based on iconography, painting style etc; Use of high quality images (with data from several spectral bands and shadow data) for image content analysis of art; Use of distributed metadata using RDF to build on existing standards; Content-based navigation for art documents separating links from content and applying links according to context at presentation time; Distributed linking and searching across multiple archives allowing ownership of data to be retained; Storage of art images using large (>1TeraByte) multimedia object relational databases. <P4> The ARTISTE approach will use the power of object-related databases and content-retrieval to enable indexing to be made dynamically, by non-experts. <P5> In other words ARTISTE would aim to give searchers tools which hint at links due to say colour or brush-stroke texture rather than saying "this is the automatically classified data". <P6> The ARTISTE project will build on and exploit the indexing scheme proposed by the AQUARELLE consortia. The ARTISTE project solution will have a core component that is compatible with existing standards such as Z39.50. The solution will make use of emerging technical standards XML, RDF and X-Link to extend existing library standards to a more dynamic and flexible metadata system. The ARTISTE project will actively track and make use of existing terminology resources such as the Getty "Art and Architecture Thesaurus" (AAT) and the "Union List of Artist Names" (ULAN). <P7> Metadata will also be stored in a database. This may be stored in the same object-relational database, or in a separate database, according to the incumbent systems at the user partners. <P8> RDF provides for metadata definition through the use of schemas. Schemas define the relevant metadata terms (the namespace) and the associated semantics. Individual RDF queries and statements may use multiple schemas. The system will make use of existing schemas such as the Dublin Core schema and will provide wrappers for existing resources such as the Art and Architecture thesaurus in a RDF schema wrapper. <P9> The Distributed Query and Metadata Layer will also provide facilities to enable queries to be directed towards multiple distributed databases. The end user will be able to seamlessly search the combined art collection. This layer will adhere to worldwide digital library standards such as Z39.50, augmenting and extending as necessary to allow the richness of metadata enabled by the RDF standard.
Conclusions
RQ "In conclusion the Artiste project will result into an interesting and innovative system for the art analysis, indexing storage and navigation. The actual state of the art of content-based retrieval systems will be positively influenced by the development of the Artiste project, which will pursue the following goals: A solution which can be replicated to European galleries, museums, etc.; Deep-content analysis software based on object relational database technology.; Distributed links server software, user interfaces, and content-based navigation software.; A fully integrated prototype analysis environment.; Recommendations for the exploitation of the project solution by European museums and galleries. ; Recommendations for the exploitation of the technology in other sectors.; "Impact on standards" report detailing augmentations of Z39.50 with RDF." ... ""Not much research has been carried out worldwide on new algorithms for style-matching in art. This is probably not a major aim in Artiste but could be a spin-off if the algorithms made for specific author search requirements happen to provide data which can be combined with other data to help classify styles." >
SOW
DC "Four major European galleries (The Uffizi in Florence, The National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Louvre related restoration centre, Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Mus├®es de France) are involved in the project. They will be joining forces with NCR, a leading player in database and Data Warehouse technology; Interactive Labs, the new media design and development facility of Italy's leading art publishing group, Giunti; IT Innovation, Web-based system developers; and the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Together they will create web based applications and tools for the automatic indexing and retrieval of high-resolution art images by pictorial content and information."
