Dear Janet
English Heritage are currently at the contract negotiation stage with the
IST programme of the European Union to develop an image based thesaurus for
the EH Thesaurus of Monument Types. The aim is to allow a non-specialist to
retrieve text based data about a specific monument type by merely describing
a building, monument or archaeological site that they have seen. The basic
principle being that if the user has seen a structure in the middle of a
field and wants to know what it is, they will be asked several questions as
to the shape, building material, height etc and then the database will bring
back images matching the criteria. The user will then be asked if any image
looks like the thing they saw. If the answer is yes then the specific
thesaurus term can be supplied and then that term can be used to search EH's
text-based monument database NewHIS. Is this the kind of project that the
IIDR can help with?
Phil Carlisle
Data Standards Supervisor
National Monuments Record Centre
-----Original Message-----
From: Janet Davis [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 11 June 2001 08:06
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Future Directions
I currently work for the Institute for Image Data Research at the University
of Northumbria. We are a multi-disciplinary team with backgrounds in art
history, psychology, software engineering, and information management. I'm
an art historian and used to work for EH (in a non-art history role) so I am
particularly interested in image data relating to archaeology, heritage,
museums, & galleries. I have been considering how research that my
colleagues are doing could be applied to archaeological images. I think that
there are some realistically achievable possibilities. People might find it
worth looking at the Institute's website to get an idea of some of the
current research on image data in the academic world, and it might spark off
ideas relevant to this discussion.
The Institute's website can be found at http://www.unn.ac.uk/iidr/
Janet Davis
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