Graph-based automatic suggestion of relationships among images of illuminated manuscripts

Abstract

Scientific research on illuminated manuscripts includes the disclosure of relationships among images belonging to different manuscripts. Relationships can be modeled as typed links, which induce an hypertext over the archive. In this paper we present a formal model for annotations, which is the basis to build methods for automatically processing existing relationships among link types and exploiting the properties of the graph which models the hypertext. The result of this processing is twofold: new relationships can be suggested to help users in their research work, and the existing ones can be semantically validated to check for inconsistencies.

To envisage and design the transition from a digital archive system developed for domain experts to one for non-domain users

“…IPSA was developed for use by professional researchers who are scholars in history of medieval art specialised in history of illumination. The aims and the results of IPSA of interest for the digital library area are presented in [1,2,3].…”

Design and Development of a Digital Archive of Illuminated Manuscripts

“…The prototype digital archive of illuminated manuscripts that has been developed within our research activities has been called Ipsa, which stands for Imaginum Patavinae Scientiae Archivum (archive of images of the Paduan science) [3,2,4], because the main focus of our initial project was to provide a tool for the analysis of the role of the Paduan school during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance for the spread of the new scientific method in difference sciences, from medicine to astronomy. IPSA is a case study for our research on methodologies and tools for researchers and scholars working on the study, the preservation and the dissemination of the cultural heritage.…”

Digital Annotations: a Formal Model and its Applications

“…CoNote [32] MADCOW [24,25] NoteCards [41,42] Annotea [50,69] Semantic Web [43,70] DLMS COLLATE [34,67] DiLAS [2,14,19] FAST [8,[10][11][12] IPSA [3,16,17] SCHOLNET [31] DBMS BIODAS [66] Data Provenance [23,27,28,40] namely Web pages, with computer-understandable data, namely metadata, and this process is called semantic annotation. The Annotea project [50,69] represents a first step in the direction of creating a shared metadata infrastructure.…”

“…In the context of Digital Library Management Systems (DLMSs), SCHOL-NET [31] uses annotations as metadata to support communication and interaction within scholarly communities by introducing a semantic annotation model, where annotations are treated as documents themselves, the semantics of which is captured by a controlled vocabulary of annotation types. In a similar context, IPSA [3,16,17] supports the annotation and personalization of a digital archive of images taken from illuminated manuscripts [29]. The goal is supporting the research on illuminated manuscripts which unveils hidden connections between illustrations belonging to different manuscripts.…”

“…We successfully applied the above mentioned strategy in the context of illuminated manuscripts [17,18]. Image digital archives of illuminated manuscripts can become a useful tool for researchers in different disciplines and we proposed to provide them with tools for annotating images to disclose hidden relationships between illustrations belonging to different works.…”