SAINT2004, Tokyo Japan, January 26-30, 2004
Workshop 4: Metadata Applications on the Broadband Network
by Atsushi Yamada (ASTEM/RI Kyoto)
Fumio Adachi (National Museum of Japanese History)
Yushi Komachi (Panasonic Communications)
Ray Atarashi (Internet Initiative Japan)
For supporting a variety of museums and satisfying a variety of user requirements to access the museums information, an integrated access scheme is discussed and proposed. The integration is based on a proposed layered framework. Some experiments on a prototype system of museum information access are shown for layer 1 and layer 2 of the framework.
A number of museums today provide their museum data on their network services. From a user's point of view, those electronic museum services have the following problems:
In order to solve those problems, there could be required such an integration mechanism that user can access all the museum data without considering the actual locations of museums, and syntaxes/semantics of meta-data and content-data of museums.
Some other integration trials (e.g., development of an integrated format of museum data) have been taken, for example, in ICOM-CIDOC[1] and Forum of the Information System on Cultural Properties and Art in Japan[2].
There are a variety of museums, which have different scopes, subjects, scales, backgrounds and purposes from each other. It leads to their specific meta-data and content-data formats and results in their specific exhibitions. Besides, there are a variety of user's/visitor's interests and expertise.
For supporting a variety of museums and satisfying a variety of user requirements to access the museums information, we have to consider an integration of semantics of museum data as well as syntaxes of the data.
NOTE: Digitizing the objects of museum is important for discussing museum information but it is outside the scope of this article. Subject data management[3] within a museum is also outside the scope. This article is based on our preliminary works published in [4], [5] and [6].
In a museum some subjects are called collections. However they are called historical materials in other museums. A naming rule of subjects/collections/materials within a museum may be different from other museums. A visitor to a museum may have no exact naming of a subject/collection/material.
As far as an old book in a museum is concerned, some visitors are interested in its language aspect and other visitors may interest in its printing layout. The aspect for a subject of a museum is not always identical to the aspect of a visitor.
An exhibition of a museum has to focus on the variety of visitor's interests. An exhibition of a museum is sometimes required to be customized in accordance with visitor's interests, e.g., for children, students, experts, etc.
Technical requirements for an integration of syntaxes and semantics of museum data lead to the layered framework:
The layer 1 deals with a sharing and conversion of information structures for museum data. The layer 2, a sharing and conversion of vocabularies within described information contents for museum data. The layer 3 supports a sharing and linking of museum information for navigating various knowledge about objects.
Museum data are described with their structure, e.g., XML-DTD, XML-Schema, etc. The structured data can be shared between museums by some structure conversion, even if the museums have their own structured data different with each other. The structure conversion can be carried out with such a mapping specification between structures. A mapping specification is described by a description language, e.g., XSLT[7].
Assume museums A and B, which have different structures of their database. When slot x of museum A database schema can be mapped with slot y of museum B database schema, data sharing between A and B can be executed by the conversion in accordance with the mapping specification x-y.
A star mapping with a centered common structure can minimize the number of mapping specification.
TBD by 山田さん (fig.あり)
Even in the converted and shared data structures, there are the following cases:
The case 1 results in an unretrievable content. In the case 2 retrieved contents include an error. Those cases require a sharing and conversion of vocabularies describing information contents.
Vocabulary sharing can be realized by the following schemes
The scheme 1 is effective within a comparatively small community or a specific group. The scheme cannot be applied to open environment, since it is difficult to define a versatile set of vocabularies. Here we have to take the scheme 2 for contents for a variety of museum.
TBD by 山田さん (どこまで書きますか?)
In the layer 3, relationships between objects are described. Relationship and object information should be described distinctively. An example of the relationship is a hyperlink to a museum object from a report or book dealing with the object.
The knowledge of curators or experts is represented as the relationships. They can describe a scenario to navigate visitors to a museum. A scenario may be created by a teacher as a school text. There could be a number of scenarios for a number of specific scopes and purposes.
Linking can easily be described outside museum information by using XLink [8]. Scenario description should be for further study.
TBD by 山田さん
[1] The International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums (ICOM-CIDOC), http://www.willpowerinfo.myby.co.uk/cidoc/
[2] Forum of the Information System on Cultural Properties and Art in Japan, http://www.tnm.go.jp/bnca/doc/Intro.en.html
[3] CIMI Consortium Museum Intelligence, http://www.cimi.org/
[4] A. Yamada, et al, Framework for integrated access to museum information, IIEEJ Annual Conference, 2002-06-21 (in Japanese)
[5] A. Yamada, et al, Conversion of museum information structure and its prototyping, 10th VMA Conference, IIEEJ, 2003-01-17 (in Japanese)
[6] A. Yamada, et al, Mapping and conversion of contents for integrated access to museum information, IIEEJ Annual Conference, 2003-06-19 (in Japanese)
[7] XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0, http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt
[8] XML Linking Language (XLink) Version 1.0, http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/