MonArch - Digital Archives for Monumental Buildings and Cultural Sites

Overview

Monumental buildings such as cathedrals, temples, palaces or castles together with their often very old and large archives form an important part of our cultural memory and heritage. Unique archival documents like medieval manuscripts, precious incunables, and church registers as well as original building plans, construction reports, old chemical formulas used for repairing and various others can be found in these archives. A growing number of original documents have been digitized in recent years. However, only few digital archives can be browsed and accessed via web portals, most of them are more or less isolated and employ proprietary browsing and retrieval facilities. On the other hand, there are good political, cultural and educational reasons to provide convenient access to digital documents to the scientific community as well as to the general public.

The goal of this project is the development of a framework for distributed web-based digital archives that are particularly appropriate for monumental buildings and cultural sites. MonArch archives can store and manage construction- and maintenance-related documents as well as documents showing or describing artwork like paintings, sculptures and others. The software supports spatial and structure-oriented queries, context-based search and retrieval, and an extensible indexing scheme based on a multidimensional metadata model. The system is cooperation-ready by both its communication architecture and its ability to use ontologies for semantical information integration.

More information

Burkhard Freitag and Christoph Schlieder. MonArch - Digital Archives for Monumental Buildings. Künstliche Intelligenz (KI), 2009, (4), 30-35.
PDF available at www.kuenstliche-intelligenz.de/fileadmin/template/main/archiv/pdf/ki2009-04_page30-35_web_full.pdf

Tobias Seppenhauser, Alexander Stenzer and Burkhard Freitag. Retrieving Cultural Heritage Information with Google Earth. APWeb 2010: Proceedings of the 12th International Asia-Pacific Web Conference. Busan, Korea. IEEE Computer Society Press, 2010.