Aquarelle - Sharing Cultural Heritage
by Alain Michard
In most countries of the European Union, policy makers, both at the
governmental and at the regional levels, are aware that the Internet is
a powerful infrastructure that can be used to disseminate cultural and
educational content, and have launched many initiatives aiming at deploying
such applications. Aquarelle is a R&D Project supported by the Telematics
Application Programme of the European Union which was initially set up
in 1995 through a tight cooperation of public authorities from four countries,
namely Greece, Italy, France and the United Kingdom, associated with research
organisations members of ERCIM and with I.T. companies from the same countries.
Through the project, this partnership have designed and is now experimenting
an original information system that offers access to the huge information
repositories which are created by public bodies and to a lesser extent
by some private organisations, and which together document our cultural
heritage.
The main challenge that had to be addressed in the project is the requirement
to provide access to legacy data which has been created well before the
emergence of the Internet, and which is supported by very heterogeneous
systems. Even restricting to digital information, data itself is heterogeneous:
it ranges from databases organised along very different schemas and based
on different terminologies, to various types of digital documents such
as multimedia presentations created for dissemination on CD-ROM, 'office
documents' created with various text-processors, or HTML documents created
for dissemination on the Web. Of course, the technologies supporting this
information are themselves extremely varied, ranging from different database
management systems to documentation systems, knowledge representation systems,
or simple HTTP servers. However, the largest part of existing cultural
heritage documentation is made of the databases created by museums and
other cultural entities, and cataloguing the collections they are in charge
of.
Museum curators, urban planners, commercial publishers and researchers
should be able to collect information relevant to their needs or interests
notwithstanding the information location and organisation. In addition,
each author of a given information component should be able to link directly
a part of his/her own creation to another information asset created and
updated by another author. Linking, annotating and commenting on relevant
pieces of information belonging to different sources will bring much more
than simple access to existing information: it will add value to the information
content itself. The overall Aquarelle architecture is designed to relieve
users from the cumbersome manual task of maintaining cross-references as
well as to support the high precision required in referencing and retrieval.
In order to develop such a hypermedia network of multimedia documents,
Aquarelle relies on two main sources of cultural information: existing
primary material, called archive data, such as records, drawings, maps
or text bases provided by the different cultural organisations (museums,
galleries, etc), and secondary material, referred to as folders, in the
form of SGML documents, describing, commenting on and referring to archive
data, as well as adding new information. Folders, in the Aquarelle sense,
are considered as containers gathering a structured collection of specific
information elements (archive data), which can be semantically linked together
(intra or inter-folder references).
In order to create a folder, users can start to retrieve, via queries
on archive and folder servers, cultural heritage information related to
their study or research interest. Furthermore, they can browse through
the retrieved folder's structure and hyperlinks to identify particular
objects of interest. Then the user can insert into the new folder references
to the relevant objects, via an SGML editor. Users will 'cycle' between
editing, retrieval and browsing until they achieve a satisfactory product.
Therefore, queries on data available in archive and folder servers play
a central role within the Aquarelle information discovery system.
Aquarelle does not impose a data schema on the primary material, which
ranges from strongly-structured (in record-oriented relational bases or
graph-oriented object bases), to semi-structured, where the structure is
looser, or irregular, or implicit (in SGML or bibliographic bases), and
unstructured raw data (images or drawings).
The system relies on the Z39.50 protocol to support access to heterogeneous
databases, including SGML document repositories. The Aquarelle Z39.50 profile
is based on Draft version 3 of the Consortium for Computer Interchange
of Museum Information (CIMI) profile, a companion profile to the Digital
Collections profile. The CIMI profile was seen to be of particular relevance,
as it aimed to support a similar, though narrower constituent community
to Aquarelle.
Interaction between a user and individual databases is mediated by an
access server. It controls access to the Aquarelle system through the user
management functions which include the storage and manipulation of user
profiles. It supports the services provided by the user client, namely
resource discovery, query handling, result management, folder publication,
and one-to-one connections with servers, through specific functions. It
provides a uniform interface to archive and folder servers based on the
search and retrieval protocol Z39.50. It also provides an interface with
a thesaurus browser to assist users in selecting query terms. Finally the
consistency of hyperlinks in folders is guaranteed by the Aquarelle link
management module.
After two years of design and development, a prototype system is now
available for experimentation. Users from cultural organisations are presently
evaluating the system. The system will be improved during the first semester
of 1998, taking into account the results of this evaluation. It is expected
that the Aquarelle system will be exploited to set-up regional and national
cultural heritage information services in the coming years.
The set of articles presented hereafter provides an overview of the
most advanced technical features of the Aquarelle system:
