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Adding Semantic Extension to Wikis for Enhancing
Cultural Heritage Applications
Eric Leclercq, Marinette Savonnet
To cite this version:
Eric Leclercq, Marinette Savonnet. Adding Semantic Extension to Wikis for Enhancing Cultural Her-
itage Applications. International Conference on Digital Information and Communication Technology
and its APplications, 2011, France. pp.348-361. �hal-00934969�
Adding Semantic Extension to Wikis for
Enhancing Cultural Heritage Applications
´
Eric Leclercq and Marinette Savonnet
LE2I Laboratory UMR CNRS 5158
Universit´e de Bourgogne
9, Avenue Alain Savary
21078 Dijon, France
{Eric.Leclercq,Marinette.Savonnet}@u-bourgogne.fr
http://le2i.cnrs.fr
Abstract. Wikis are appropriate systems for community -a u t h o red con-
tent. In the past few years, they show that are particularly suitable for
collaborative works in cultural heritage. In this paper, we highlight how
wikis can be relevant solu ti o n s fo r b u i ld i n g cooperative applicati o n s i n
domains characterized by a rapid evolution of knowledge. We will po int
out the capabilities of semantic extension to provide better quality of
content, to improve searching, to support complex queries and finally
to carry out different type of users. We describe the CARE project and
explain the conceptual modeling approach. We detail the architecture of
WikiBridge, a semantic wiki which allows simple, n-ary and recursive an-
notations as well as consistency checking. A specific section is dedicated
to the ontology design which is the compulsory foundationa l knowledge
for the application.
Key words: Semantic Wiki, Ontology Engine erin g , Cultural Heritage
application
1 Introduction
Collaborative platforms that manage scientific knowledge are essential tools for
scientists to hel p them to formalize their ideas, to develop theories collabora-
tively, to publish results (research articles, technical reports, data sets, etc.) and
to produce knowledge for different kind of users. Moreover, a collabor ati ve plat-
form should be able to integrate oth er services such as v i su al iz at ion tools, or
spatial analysis tools.
Wiki sol u t i ons meet th e requirements of a web platf or m with c ollaborative
capabilities. Easy setup and ri ch editing support are pri mar y reasons for the
widespread adoption of wikis. Users can enter text and others types of data
(pictures, video) and connect content through hyperlinks. Most of wikis also
provides a versioning system to track content changes and a full-text search
engine for querying wiki pages.
The narrative structure is one advantage of wiki documents centric approach,
compared to a database centric approach. In a database centric approach, the
database schema is built upon entities identified in the first step of analysis,
and thus based on an instant knowledge. In domains characterized by a rapid
evolution of knowledge, such as biol ogy or archaeology, a static dat abas e schema
is not suitable and can be proscribed by the cost of evolution. Nevertheless, a
mere document managem ent system is not sufficient to catch interdependent
structures of knowledge. For example, domain specialists often need to comment
on primary data. Adding semantic annotation capabilities to documents allows
different levels of interpretation and can sustain: 1) knowledge evolution by keep-
ing track of the successive annotations; 2) better quality in the query evaluation
process; and 3) amenable result displayed according to user skills. Annotations
can be defined at a coarse grained level (wh ole document) or at a fine grained
level (i.e. attached to a piece of text). An ontology must be associated to the
annotation system to provide a semantics for annotation terms according to
domain knowledge.
Semantic wi k i solutions meet the requirements of annotation system and
knowledge description. Adding semantics yields two dimensions of enhancements
to a wiki: 1) adding a more formal structure to the wiki; 2) exporting, integrat-
ing and reusing information by the adop t ion of standard semantic technologies.
Compared to a traditional database, a semantic wiki allows: 1) to expand the
structure of documents content; 2) to enable a data model emergence from the
usage; and 3) to support collaborative, distributed workflows and processes. Se-
mantic wiki thus seems to combine the best from two worlds: structure f r om
databases as well as expandability and collaboration capabilities from wiki sys-
tems.
The re st of the paper is organized as follow: section 2 gives an overview of the
CARE project, section 3 describes the requirements and WikiBridge architec-
ture, section 4 describes semantic tools for archaeology, and section 5 discusses
related works. Finally, section 6 concludes the paper.
2 Project overview
The aims of the international project CARE (Corpus Architecturae Religios ae
Europeae) is the setting up of a corpus describ i ng Christian edifices in Eu-
rope (http://care.u-bourgogne.fr). Italy, Spain, Czech Republic, Poland,
Slovakia, France and Croatia have been included in the project four years ago.
Each edifice is described in a document that focuses on the description of stat es
of evolutions from the 4th century to the 11th century. The French corpus fo-
cuses on the 7th an d 8th centuries with very rich decades in t er ms of number
of monuments. The French p art of the project is supported by a French ANR
funding (ANR-07-CORP-011).
Representing and managing knowledge in cultural heritage requ i re a deep
understanding of specific concepts. Building coll aborative platform brings out
some challenging characteristics: 1) complexity of data (heterogeneou s, incom-
plete, uncertain, inconsistent, spatial, temporal); 2) domain knowledge barrier;
3) evolving kn owledge; and 4) skills of actors.
2.1 The CARE community
From an organizational perspective, the CARE project takes the form of an ex-
pert network collecting and providing information on edific es , analyzing histori-
cal sources, filling documents and collaborating in the exploitation of the corpus
through smaller research groups. Furthermore, t h e project involves undergrad-
uate students that help in collecting information but lack expertise required to
interpret data. In France, more than sixty researchers are collecting and ana-
lyzing data concerning approximately 2700 monuments. Two key characteristics
describe the CARE community:
multi-disciplinarity: The dat a collecting process involves archaeologists, his-
torians, art historians, topographers, draftsmen. It is designed as a collabo-
rative process which merges information from various discipli ne s;
inter-disciplinarity: The interpretation of data brings together all th e actors
which also enrich their respective practices by the confrontation of methods
or prob l ems .
2.2 Conceptual modeling for the f ou n dat ion al knowledge
Linster in [11] shows that the interaction among domain experts, knowledge
engineers and tools creates the k n owledge. He has shown that the process of
elaborating a knowledge-based system is a constructive model-building process
that includes: a discussion process between knowledge engineers and domain
experts as well as the construction of a conceptual model (i.e. a gener al and
abstract framework). Thus, the knowledge engineering act i v ity encompasses the
design of two kinds of models: model to make sense and model to implement
systems.
We have applied Linster’s guideline s to the CARE project in order to ini-
tiate a foundational knowledge from the corpus of documents. The first stage
is the salient concepts identification. The key concept is the edifice to whi ch it
is essential to model changes. All constituent elements of a building need to be
described. They can delimit space or define religious function (baptismal , fu-
nerary, etc.). All changes of space or religious function determine a new edifice
state. Edifices and their evolutions are described in a set of documents. Salient
concepts let us to build a conceptual model, three groups of elements have been
identified (figure 1):
1. spatial concepts without temporal relationship (light grey): concept EGS
refers to edifice, group of edifices or space inside edifice such as nave or apse.
Composition relationships can be identified between EGS.
2. spatio-temporal concepts (grey) called SEGS, represent variations of spatial
concepts in time. Spatio-temporal concepts are linked to a date or a period.
Dating elements can be determined by documents, or described by methods
such as C14, ther mol u mi ne sc en ce or stratigr ap hy.
3. identification of vocabulary terms for the project domain (black). While
concepts EGS and SEGS are used to structure the descriptions, terms are
used to describe specific elements, properties of edifices, religious functions
or manufacturing techniques.
Dating element
Type: String
Location: String
Function: String
EdificeGroupSpace(EGS)
0..*
1..*
Document
Title: String
well−documented 1..*0..*
DatingElement
0..*
0..*
attests
StateEdificeGroupSpace(SEGS)
Type: String
Function: String
1..*1 links
1..*
0,1
has
constituent element
Religious functionEdifice space (nave, transept, altar, burial, ...)
Fig. 1. Conceptual model of the CARE corpus
The des cr i pt i on of the construct i on of the ontology is detailed in Section 4.
3 WikiBridge’s architecture
In a survey authored by Uren et al. [15], authors study semantic annotation,
identify a number of requirements, and review some semantic annotation sys-
tems. WikiBrid ge’ s design principles, in agreement with the CARE community,
are following of the seven req u ire m ents given by Uren et al.: easy to use in-
terface, user collaborative design, support of different u se r skills, support of
heterogeneous format, compatibility with Semantic Web standards, annotation
capabilities and storage, support for reasoning.
In the nex t subsect i on we develop the most important r eq ui r em ents with
regards to t h e architectural design of WikiBridge.
3.1 Requirements
In a knowledge engineering process, it is common that non -t e chnical domain ex-
perts work together with experienced knowledge engineers. To support different
levels of users skill certain advanced functionaliti e s should be hidden from novice
users but made available to experienced users. Thus, we use an Access Control
