:: What do we mean by 'Intelligent Heritage'? ::

Knowledge-based and semantic web-based projects

Sculpteur
Mosaica

[lots more to go in here on semantic web]
Other than the above work on the semantic web and knowledge management, I'm not sure I really know what else 'Intelligent Heritage' is—or, at least, what 'intelligent' means in this context—and I'm rather of the opinion that no one else really quite knows. A DigiCult document offers us a bland definition of "Intelligent heritage [as] research into the interface between technology and heritage sites and visitor experiences" (and I'll explain later where this comes from). On the European Commission IST web site a page bearing the title "Intelligent Heritage: New Cultural Experiences in Virtual Worlds" lists five FP6 projects, in not one of which does the notion of 'intelligence', human or machine, play a significant role (though 3D modelling and virtual reconstructions, here as elsewhere, figure prominently). A Powerpoint presentation by Daniel Pletinckx of the Ename Center, Belgium, "Intelligent Cultural Heritage", downloadable from the same site, displays the word 'intelligent' nowhere other than in the title; a presentation by David Arnold, University of Brighton, entitled "Mapping the future: Intelligent Heritage - The research perspective" promises rather vaguely "to improve integration of applications’ knowledge into interactive techniques used in building cultural heritage applications" and "to improve the look and feel for users, particularly for non-specialists users, of cultural heritage applications"; yet nowhere do I (perhaps prejudiced by my background in artificial intelligence and by an obviously narrow-minded insistence on the literal meanings of words) see anything that seems 'intelligent' about the technologies under discussion. The inter-institutional Intelligent Media Institute held an "Intelligent Heritage Research Workshop" at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in November 2005, yet the 'intelligent' component seems elusive. The claim of Salzburg Research's eCulture Group to be "developing new approaches in making cultural resources self-describing, retrievable and presentable based on conceptual models (e.g. semantic frameworks and ontologies)" is a tad more plausible; but persuasive detail is scant. Bernard Smith, speaking in October 2002 for the European Commission's General Directorate for Information Society on 'The opportunities for cultural heritage within the 6th Framework Programme for Research and Development', proclaims that:

For intelligent heritage we are funding some very practical projects on image capture and management as well as some rather more advanced projects looking at virtual and augmented reality, in particular in the field of digital archaeology.

thus apparently confounding, as do many others, 'intelligence' with 'virtual reality' and 3D imaging. The fact of the matter, it seems to me (but correct me if I'm wrong), is that "intelligent" has become an increasingly meaning-free buzz-word, a Euro-speak label, whose origins undoubtedly lie in the 2001 ISTAG report on 'Scenarios of Ambient Intelligence in 2010', edited by Ducatel et al., with its

emphasis is on greater user-friendliness, more efficient services support, user-empowerment, and support for human interactions. People are surrounded by intelligent intuitive interfaces that are embedded in all kinds of objects and an environment that is capable of recognising and responding to the presence of different individuals in a seamless, unobtrusive and often invisible way.
[from the Preface to the ISTAG report]

So, faute de mieux, lets go back to where we started, with the DigiCult document, which identifies the research goals from 2005 onwards as:

• "to develop enriched conceptual representations of cultural and scientific knowledge backed by systems and tools which optimise their potential for a wide variety of user interests. This will encourage innovative use of cultural heritage through creative online communities
• "to create adequate mechanisms for the sourcing, appraisal, validation, management and long-term preservation of digitised and born-digital cultural information. Ultimately, this will require the development of increasingly automatic approaches using intelligent systems for understanding and managing digital memory, including how to cope with very high volume, dynamic and adaptive content."

The above is all by way of a cautionary preamble to the real meat of this section: to programmes and projects that use the word 'intelligent' with some degree of seriousness, and don't simply conflate 'intelligent' with virtual worldsand 3D models.

• EPOCH: the European Research Network of Excellence in Open Cultural Heritage
  » http://www.epoch-net.org
• Alpharis
  Alpharis is not directly concerned with heritage, intelligent or otherwise. Rather, it's a technology based on non-proprietary formats "dedicated to create and distribute Collective Knowledge by an Internet Knowledge Management Tool ... With Alpharis we would like to contribute to a collective organization of Knowledge where each of us could separate information, data, network intelligence in single and different elements which can then be combined together in endless and unnumbered possibilities." Its relevance, as a technology, to 'intelligent heritage' is as obvious as it is exciting in its potential.
  » http://www.alpharis.net

Novel information architectures: Faceted classification

... there's more than one way to slice the cake :)

Taxonomic thinking ...


Museum exhibits are inherently multi-faceted, unavoidably dislocated, in both time and space, from their originating historical, geographical, social, political, economic, industrial, and epistemic contexts of occurrence and use. Museums will characteristically, with many exhibits, endeavour to compensate for this inevitable decontextualisation through well-designed displays; nevertheless most exhibits will still paradigmatically be consigned to glass cases with brief explanatory text on white cards, the aggregation of disparate objects often disconcertingly reminiscent of Lautréamont's “rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie”.

What is faceted classifications all about?

Denton, W. (2003). 'How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web'
» http://www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-web-howto.html

'IA E-Learning - Faceted Classification' podcasts at IAVoice
» http://iavoice.typepad.com/ia_voice/2007/01/ia_elearning_fa.html

Use of Faceted Classification in web design
» http://www.webdesignpractices.com/navigation/facets.html

Examples

Flamenco
"Flamenco is a web-based interface for browsing large collections of items such as documents or photographs. In a Flamenco collection, each item is assigned one or more category terms from one or more facets. A facet is a set of categories; for example, buildings could be classified under a "material" facet (with categories such as "brick" and "wood") and a "location" facet (with categories such as "France" and "Winnipeg"). In a hierarchical facet, the categories are arranged in a hierarchy tree."
» http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/demos.html

Elastic Lists Demo: Nobel Prize Winners
"a demonstration of the 'elastic list' principle for browsing multi-faceted data structures. Click any number of list entries to query the database for a combination of the selected attributes. If you create an 'impossible' configuration, your selection will be reduced until a match is possible. The example data is based on the Noble prize winners dataset used in the Flamenco facet browser."
» http://well-formed-data.net/experiments/elastic_lists/

mSpace
"An mSpace presents several associated categories from an information space, and then lets users manipulate how many of these categories are presented and how they're arranged. In this way, people can organize the information to suit their interests, while concurrently having available to them multiple other complementary paths through that information."
»http://mspace.fm

FacetMap
The FacetMap Wine Demo
» http://facetmap.com

The MIT Libraries demo, using the Longwell faceted browser
» http://simile.mit.edu/longwell/demo/libraries/

References, readings, and resources

Ducatel, K., Bogdanowicz, M., Scapolo, F., Leijten, J. & Burgelman, J-C. (2001). 'Scenarios of Ambient Intelligence in 2010'. European Commission, IST Advisory Group (ISTAG), Seville. [Web]

European Commission, 'Intelligent Heritage: New Cultural Experiences in Virtual Worlds'
» http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/digicult/intelligent-heritage.htm

Grant, A. & Miller, P. (2000). 'Metadata: Towards the intelligent museum', Ariadne, 25, September 2000. ISSN: 1361-3200. [Web]