Petroglyph digitization: enabling cultural heritage scholarship

The digitization of antiquities is facilitating a renaissance for scholars who have unprecedented access to rich representations of objects. Cultural Heritage digitization is a central challenge, and its subtleties are intertwined with object properties and the constraints of physical access and handling. In this paper, we present the design and analysis of a system built for the digitization of Puerto Rican petroglyphic iconography. The petroglyphs exhibit unique properties (shape, size, surface) that determine system design choices. The 3D models obtained with the system support new scholarly and educational activities, including interactive surface lighting, feature highlighting and annotation through mark-up, and immersive viewing using large-scale displays.     

Computer security: The long road ahead

When securing extant data-processing systems and networks, one is confronted with a serious conflict between theory and practice. While theory provides watertight strategies for securing data processing, defining proper naming conventions, using passwords responsibly, inspecting log-data sets effectively, and selecting only programs which are secure, practice shows many pitfalls. It is fact, that many well-intentioned security projects fail due to an unrealistic approach, lack of manpower and ill-assigned priorities. Equally, data can hardly be classified due to historical pollution and many users flout security rules, e.g. those concerning passwords. Moreover, weaknesses are introduced by lack of proper auditing tools, by micro-mainframe links, and by sloppiness of staff. This paper will critically review the gap between theory and practice, and will justify some bold statements by quoting examples from the author's practice.     

Microprocessor design issues: thoughts on the road ahead

With the scaling of technology promising increases in chip frequency and especially transistor density, system designers must make trade-offs for a rapidly moving target. They must constantly deal with area, time, power, reliability, and technology design trade-offs as well as enormous design complexity at the same time. The driving force in design innovation is the rapid advance in technology. As technology advances and feature size shrinks, the three other design considerations benefit from one process generation to another, resulting in higher speed, smaller area, and reduced power consumption. Here, we look at the technology roadmap and what it means to computer architects, updating our views of six years ago.     

The Transboundary Crisis: Why we are unprepared and the road ahead

Modern societies rely on complex technological systems that are deeply intertwined with other complex systems that stretch across geographical, judicial and administrative borders. When threats emanate from this transboundary space, national governments are often surprised and discover that existing crisis management arrangements do not suffice. This article describes the political and administrative challenges that accompany transboundary crises. It argues that arrangements and processes that work reasonably well for “bounded” crises are unlikely to work in the case of transboundary crises. It formulates an agenda for political debate and academic research. The bottom line is that we need to rethink traditional crisis management arrangements in order to prepare for these increasingly common type of threats.     

From open IS semantics to the Semantic Web: the road ahead

The Semantic Web should ideally combine the best of AI research with the best of Internet research. This analysis looks at distributed AI, Open Information Systems Semantics, and the Semantic Web and presents several open research issues.     

Recommending multimedia visiting paths in cultural heritage applications

The valorization and promotion of worldwide Cultural Heritage by the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies represent nowadays some of the most important research issues with a large variety of potential applications. This challenge is particularly perceived in the Italian scenario, where the artistic patrimony is one of the most diverse and rich of the world, able to attract millions of visitors every year to monuments, archaeological sites and museums. In this paper, we present a general recommendation framework able to uniformly manage heterogeneous multimedia data coming from several web repositories and to provide context-aware recommendation techniques supporting intelligent multimedia services for the users—i.e. dynamic visiting paths for a given environment. Specific applications of our system within the cultural heritage domain are proposed by means of real case studies in the mobile environment related both to an outdoor and indoor scenario, together with some results on user’s satisfaction and system accuracy.     

贵州非物质文化遗产的数据挖掘与分析

贵州省非物质文化遗产极为丰富,蕴涵着贵州各民族特有的精神价值、思维方式、想象力和文化意识,体现着贵州各民族的生命力和创造力。为了更好地发掘和保护贵州非物质文化遗产,通过对贵州省非物质文化遗产保护中心网的数据挖掘,采用词云分析、聚类分析和可视化技术等,对贵州非物质文化遗产的文本数据进行处理,并提取有价值的关键文本信息,为贵州非物质文化遗产的传承和发展提供依据。     

Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented.     

Infoweb: An adaptive information filtering system for the cultural heritage domain

This paper presents a system developed for adaptive retrieval and the filtering of documents belonging to digital libraries available on the Web. This system, called InfoWeb, is currently in operation on the ENEA (National Entity for Alternative Energy) digital library Web site reserved to the cultural heritage and environment domain. InfoWeb records the user information needs in a user model, created through a representation, which extends the traditional vector space model and takes the form of a semantic network consisting of co-occurrences between index terms. The initial user model is built on the basis of stereotypes, developed through a clustering of the collection by using specific documents as a starting point. The user's query can be expanded in an adaptive way, using the user model formulated by the user himself. The system has been tested on the entire collection comprising about 14,000 documents in HTML/text format. The results of the experiments are satisfactory both in terms of performance and in terms of the system's ability to adapt itself to the user's shifting interests.     

Three-dimensional acquisition of large and detailed cultural heritage objects

Cultural heritage digitization is becoming more common every day, but the applications discussed in the literature address mainly the digitization of objects at a resolution proportional to the object size, using low resolution for large artifacts such as buildings or large statues, and high resolution for small detailed objects. The case studied in this paper concerns a huge physical model of imperial Rome (16 × 17.5 m) whose extremely small details forced the use of high resolution and low noise scanning, in contrast with the long range needed. This paper gives an account of the procedures and the technologies used for solving this “contradiction”.     

Non-IID data and Continual Learning processes in Federated Learning: A long road ahead

Federated Learning is a novel framework that allows multiple devices or institutions to train a machine learning model collaboratively while preserving their data private. This decentralized approach is prone to suffer the consequences of data statistical heterogeneity, both across the different entities and over time, which may lead to a lack of convergence. To avoid such issues, different methods have been proposed in the past few years. However, data may be heterogeneous in lots of different ways, and current proposals do not always determine the kind of heterogeneity they are considering. In this work, we formally classify data statistical heterogeneity and review the most remarkable learning Federated Learning strategies that are able to face it. At the same time, we introduce approaches from other machine learning frameworks. In particular, Continual Learning strategies are worthy of special attention, since they are able to handle habitual kinds of data heterogeneity. Throughout this paper, we present many methods that could be easily adapted to the Federated Learning settings to improve its performance. Apart from theoretically discussing the negative impact of data heterogeneity, we examine it and show some empirical results using different types of non-IID data.     

Ontology-based mobile augmented reality in cultural heritage sites: information modeling and user study

Augmented reality (AR) has received much attention in the cultural heritage domain as an interactive medium for requesting and accessing information regarding heritage sites. In this study, we developed a mobile AR system based on Semantic Web technology to provide contextual information about cultural heritage sites. Most location-based AR systems are designed to present simple information about a point of interest (POI), but the proposed system offers information related to various aspects of cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, linked to the POI. This is achieved via an information modeling framework where a cultural heritage ontology is used to aggregate heterogeneous data and semantically connect them with each other. We extracted cultural heritage data from five web databases and modeled contextual information for a target heritage site (Injeongjeon Hall and its vicinity in Changdeokgung Palace in South Korea) using the selected ontology. We then implemented a mobile AR application and conducted a user study to assess the learning and engagement impacts of the proposed system. We found that the application provides an agreeable user experience in terms of its affective, cognitive, and operative features. The results of our analysis showed that specific usage patterns were significant with regard to learning outcomes. Finally, we explored how the study’s key findings can provide practical design guidance for system designers to enhance mobile AR information systems for heritage sites, and to show system designers how to support particular usage patterns in order to accommodate specific user experiences better.

     

MOSAICA: A web-2.0 based system for the preservation and presentation of cultural heritage

The question of how to present cultural heritage resources in a way that attracts potential users is becoming important in our ever-changing world. This paper describes MOSAICA system – a web 2.0-based toolbox, dedicated for the preservation and presentation of cultural heritage. This paper also describes an evaluation study that examined MOSAICA system’s usability and social impact. Online questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were administered among users from Israel, France, and Poland. Findings indicated positive views related to MOSAICA’s usage in terms of knowledge gain, ease of use, and attractiveness. Findings also indicated that learning about the stories, customs, and traditions of diverse cultures, via hypertext narratives, may enhance positive dispositions toward open-mindedness, in general, and non-judgmental views, in specific. MOSAICA system provides a generic framework for users, of any culture and religion, to actively engage in preserving their heritage via activities such as investigation, exploration, and storytelling.     

振源定位技术在文化遗产地保护中的应用

文化遗产地周边振动环境对文物的影响问题日益突出,如爆破、强冲击施工等产生的环境振动对文化遗产地的文物安全可能会产生严重的影响,有必要对振动环境进行监测,同时定位对文物有破坏性影响的振源位置,为文物预防性保护工作提供科学依据和技术支持。研究了基于地振动的振源定位算法,提出适用于文化遗产地周边强夯、爆破施工等违规工业振源的定位方法,计算机仿真结果验证了该方法的有效性。研究了振动测点布设阵型和数量对定位效果的影响,提出了确定振动测点布设阵型和数量的方法,为进一步建设文化遗产地监测系统提供理论依据。     

水平集网格简化算法在遗址场景中的应用

将水平集方法引入到三维模型网格简化中,构造符号距离函数,函数的零集定义为初始曲面;引入一个能量泛涵,通过对其极小化诱导出一个水平集形式的二阶几何偏微分方程,从而将网格简化过程转化为隐式模型的体素扩散过程。该方法目前已经用于文化遗产数字化的大场景和文物的模型简化中。对水平集网格简化算法和现常用的基于点对收缩的网格简化算法在视觉质量和几何误差方面做了比较和分析,实验表明该方法适用于任意拓扑形状的网格模型,使得模型大规模简化后,在保持较低误差的同时,仍然能够保持相当多的重要几何特征和较好的整体视觉效果。     

Integration of 3D and multispectral data for cultural heritage applications: Survey and perspectives

Cultural heritage is increasingly put through imaging systems such as multispectral cameras and 3D scanners. Though these acquisition systems are often used independently, they collect complementary information (spectral vs. spatial) used for the study, archiving and visualization of cultural heritage. Recording 3D and multispectral data in a single coordinate system enhances the potential insights in data analysis.     

A visual analytics approach for flood risk analysis and decision-making in cultural heritage

World cultural heritage is the accumulation and essence of the development of human civilization, as well as the rare and irreplaceable treasures bestowed by history. However, cultural heritage is increasingly exposed to various risks caused by natural and man-made factors. Flood risk is the most common and the most devastating risk for cultural heritage. This study proposes a visual analytics method that supports the visual analysis of flood risk from multiple aspects, including predicted flood peak flow, flood propagation, flood impact, and vulnerability. The proposed method can also provide the required information from multiple scales, including the basin-, site-, multi-cave-, and single-cave-scale levels. The combination of the visualization techniques of flood risk analysis will enable the proposed method to support users to make decisions with respect to mitigation measures. Lastly, the proposed method is evaluated by water experts and cultural heritage site managers.     

A novel approach for automatic text analysis and generation for the cultural heritage domain

Knowledge is information that has been contextualised in a certain domain, to be used or applied. It represents the basic core of our Cultural Heritage and Natural Language provides us with prime versatile means of construing experience at multiple levels of organization. The natural language generation field consists in the creation of texts providing information contained in other kind of sources (numerical data, graphics, taxonomies and ontologies or even other texts), with the aim of making such texts indistinguishable, as far as possible, from those created by humans. On the other hand, the knowledge extraction, basing on text mining and text analysis tasks, as examples of the many applications born from computational linguistic, provides summarization, categorization, topics extractions from textual resources using linguistic concepts, which deal with the imprecision and ambiguity of human language. This paper presents a research activity focused on exploring and scientifically describing knowledge structure and organization involved in textual resources’ generation. Thus, a novel multidimensional model for the representation of conceptual knowledge, is proposed. Furthermore, a real case study in the Cultural Heritage domain is described to demonstrate the effectiveness and the feasibility of the proposed model and approach.