Combining Cultural Heritage Related Web Resources in 3D Information Landscapes

Abstract

In recent years, the number of data collections that are publicly available via the Internet has dramatically increased. Web based semantic databases like Wikipedia derivate DbPedia extend the functionality of Wikipedia by allowing semantic annotations to the information that is usually in form of free text. Since these data collections also cover broad topics related to the Cultural Heritage (CH) domain, they might be well suited to serve as data sources for Cultural Information Systems. Besides the mentioned community based knowledge bases, a number of dedicated Web galleries, for example the Web Gallery of Art (WGA), offer huge digital collections of artworks and relevant metadata. Moreover, renowned institutions like the Getty Foundation provide rich vocabularies of CH related terms that are rather aimed at professional users. We believe that a combination of such different sources might provide interesting insights that would not be available when using each source alone. We therefore propose a system that combines these sources and displays them by using methods from Information Visualisation. We apply the metaphor of 3D Information Landscapes, based on a graph visualisation showing artists and their artworks as nodes and their mutual relationships such as teacher/student, parent/child etc. as edges. The resulting network is drawn in chronological order, thus allowing users to explore art history in a new way.