e-Culture Platform for Cultural Heritage Services

Watchira Buranasing, Thepchai Supnithi, Marut Buranarach, Chai WutiwiwatchaiNational Electronics and Computer Technology Center

Thailand Science Park, Klong Luang, Pathumthani 12120, Thailand {watchira.buranasing, thepchai.supnithi, marut.buranarach, chai.wutiwiwatchai}@nectec.or.th

Abstract

The Cultural heritage is an important rule for understanding the history and the way of life of people’s groups. Digital technology has become an issue for preserving the cultural material in digital format. This paper introduces an approach for creating a platform for cultural heritage services. Our approach is the interoperability among the datasets from different institutions both formal cultural institutions such as ministry of culture, fine arts department and cultural communities such as local museums, temples, local agents. We create a cultural heritage portal archive and API for supporting the developer for creating the applications. The extended platform will focus on two issues: (1) the cultural heritage knowledge, focus on entities, relations among entities, constraints, and rules for reasoning and (2) user behavior, we expand the work scope related to tourism domain for studying the tourist’s behavior.

Keywords: Cultural heritage, Digital Archive, Cultural Heritage Service, e-Culture platform

I. Introduction

Cultural heritage [1][2] is an important rule for understanding the history and the way of life of people’s groups. Digital technology has become an issue for preserving the cultural material in digital format, that is reliable and usable. Converting from analog materials to digital formats can help long-term preservation. The digital preservation systems should be capable of handling digital information in a wide variety of formats such as text, data, graphics, video, and sound. It is huge scale for transferring of the heterogeneous materials and require long-term maintenance of metadata standard and cultural management system. Digital preservation usually uses in the cultural institution such as libraries, archives, and museums, but it can be used in cultural preservation communities such as local museums and cultural volunteer groups.

There are some cultural heritage institutions use digital preservation technology for collecting cultural materials such as Museum Finland [3], Amsterdam Museum[4], Smithsonian [5] and British Museum [6]. In addition to some institutions collect the digital material from collaborative institute such as Europeana [7], that collect the digitized cultural heritage material from cultural heritage institutions. They share the

collections and present the cultural material, that related items from different countries with different perspectives.

Previous work in cultural heritage platform focus on data collection. EUROPEANA[8] is a project funded by the European Union that offers a multidisciplinary platform which operates as an aggregator connecting the cultural heritage institutions across Europe. Francesca M. Dagnino et al. [9] present an integrated platform to support the learning and transmission of intangible cultural heritage (ICH). David myers and Alison Dalgity [10] present the Arches heritage inventory and management system for the benefit of practitioners working with heritage inventories. Matteo Abrate [11] develop the web platform collect the letters of Christophorus Clavius with three different levels of analysis such as linguistic, lexical and semantic. Mirtha L. Fernandez Venero [12] present OpenMuseum, a platform for collaboration and knowledge sharing between cultural heritage institutions.

This paper introduces an approach for creating a platform for cultural heritage services. Our approach is the interoperability of the datasets from different institutions both formal cultural institutions such as ministry of culture, fine arts department and cultural communities such as local museums, temples, local agents. We develop a cultural heritage portal archive and API for supporting the developer for creating the applications.

The remaining of the paper is organized as follows. Section II gives an overview of the e-culture platform for cultural heritage services. Section III shows conclusion and discussion of future directions.

II. Overview of system design and functionality

A. System design and functionality

The e-culture platform is a simple, but efficient architecture. The platform architecture for supporting both data and service for the implementation of several services such as web application, mobile application, and the application for the internet of thing devices. Figure 1. shows the system design.

Figure 1. The system design of the e-culture platform.

We collect data from various data sources. We develop the e-culture management system to collect data from local museum or cultural communities and harvest data from formal cultural institutions. We develop a cultural heritage portal to collect all data. Using data from the portal for developing API for creating the applications.

B. e-Culture Management System

The e-culture management system is a software application for archiving and cataloging of cultural materials. The metadata of this application is based on cultural materials such as ISAD (G) metadata standard for the digital archive, CDWA metadata for museum objects and added some elements from cultural experts. The application used by local museums, temples and cultural agents for digital asset management. Figure 2. shows the e-Culture management system.

Figure 2. The e-Culture management system.

C. e-Culture Portal

e-Culture portal is a web portal for collect data from e-culture management system and data from formal cultural institutions. There are two parts of the e-Culture portal. The first is the website designed to explore heritage sites. The website shows general information about the e-Culture project and the e-culture site that created by local communities using e-Culture management system and locates on an interactive map. Figure 3. shows the cultural map of this project.

Figure 3. The cultural map.

The second part is data integration that combines the data from various data sources with different metadata. We create metadata standard for exchange among data sources. The metadata exchange standard based on Dublin Core metadata schemes and add some elements from cultural heritage committee. Table 1. shows the examples of metadata exchange standard.

Table 1. The examples of metadata exchange standard.

TitleCreatorDescriptionDateMedia TypesCultural Heritage Types

Historical EventsPeriod of time (art era)Period of time (historical era)LocationInstitutiionsURLKeywords

D. e-Culture API

Application program interface (API) is a software intermediary or technical development environment that enables access to another application or platform. We develop API for supporting developer for creating the applications. e-Culture API support JSON data input and output formats. Figure 4. shows the example of API.

Figture 4. The example of API.

E. e-Culture applications

e-Culture applications are the applications that use e-Culture API for development such as web applications, mobile applications and the applications for the internet of things devices. Figure 5. shows the example of e-Culture applications, which show the historical sites from e-Culture portal using API.

Figure 5. The example of e-Culture applications

III. Conclusion and Future WorkIn this paper, we presented an ongoing project, called e-Culture platform for collaboration and data sharing among cultural heritage institutions. We develop a cultural heritage portal archive and API for supporting the developer for creating the applications. Most of the work developed for data integration and sharing. For our future work, we design to focus on two issues, which are the cultural heritage knowledge and user behavior. The cultural heritage knowledge, we will concentrate on entities, relations among entities, constraints, and rules for reasoning. The user behavior, we expand the work scope related to tourism domain for studying the tourist’s behavior.

IV. AcknowledgementsThis work has been carried out on the e-culture platformproject.

References

[1] Wikipedia : Culture, https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture, 2015

[2] Culture, https://www.tamu.edu/faculty/choudhury/culture.html

[3] Museum Finland [3], EeroHyvönen, EetuMäkelä, MirvaSalminen, ArttuValo, KimViljanen ม SamppaSaarela, MiikkaJunnila, SuviKettula, MuseumFinland—Finnish museums on the semantic web, Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, Volume 3, Issues 2–3, October 2005, Pages 224-241

[4] Victor de Boer, Jan Wielemaker, Judith van Gent, Michiel Hildebrand, Anoine Isaac,Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Guus Schreiber : Supporting Linked Data Production for CulturalHeritage institutes:The Amsterdam Museum Case Study, ESWC, volume 7295 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012, pp 733-747.

[5] Pedro Szekely, Craig A. Knoblock, Fengyu Yang, Xuming Zhu, Eleanor E. Fink , Rachel Allen, Georgina Goodl : Connecting the Smithsonian American Art Museum to the

Linked Data Cloud, the 10th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), 2013

[6] British Museum, http://www.britishmuseum.org/[7] The Europeana Foundation:Europeana Linked Open

Data Culture, http://labs.europeana.eu [8] Transforming the world with culture: Europeana

Foundation, September 2015[9] Francesca M. Dagnino, Leontios J. Hadjileontiadis,

Michela Ott, Francesca Pozzi, An Integrated Platform Supporting Intangible Cultural Heritage Learning and Transmission: Definition of Requirements and Evaluation Criteria, Journal of Computing and Information Technology, Vol 22, No 4. (2014)

[10] David Myers and Alison Dalgity , The Arches heritage inventory and management system: a platform for the heritage field, Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development, August 2016

[11] Matteo Abrate, Sharing Cultural Heritage: the Clavius on the Web Project. Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), May 2014.

[12] Mirtha L. Fernandez Venero , Claudia J. Abrao de Araujo, Diego Mira David , Flavio Soares Correa da Silva, Ana Goncalves Magalhaes:OpenMuseum: a framework for collaboration between cultural heritage institutions, 2013