Culture Heritage

Goals

VI-SEEM aims at strengthening links among key players in the field bringing users currently working autonomously together. Large potential is identified for research groups that have not used large scale computing before. Linking these to experienced groups will significantly improve productivity. The SEEM region is renowned for its ancient civilizations. It is also an area of major socioeconomic and cultural developments during the medieval and early modern periods. Hence another goal of the project is to facilitate access to the immense CH data in the region.

Today the knowledge gained from the interdisciplinary study of cultural artifacts that aims at their preservation and attempts to highlight the value of cultural heritage. VI-SEEM responds to the pressing need for international collaborations and shared activities for the sustainable creation of multicultural inclusive environments and the untapped potential of digital technologies and ICT, which create the right conditions for developing and testing transregional strategies that enable the use of cross-media content and the creation of a polythematic agenda.

Data storage and handling is one of the most pressing and challenging needs of the Cultural Heritage community. VI-SEEM focuses on the provision of the tools and resources for regional scientists to cast their data into content management systems, hence providing the stepping-stone to join larger initiatives on the longer run. This step-wise process will also help the data curators to address important issues such as data ownership and rights management, which often are the cause for data not to be accessible in the first place. In particular, VI-SEEM will aim to support regional digitization initiatives in a number of countries in the region that aim at assembling collections that have found their way to foreign museums.

VI-SEEM will provide to the digital CH community support in the following applications:

1. Content/data management and shared access. The most popular type of application is that of a Digital Library, and communities requested support in semantic organization of data in order to make data available, discoverable, intelligible and searchable, as well as meta-data generation opportunities;

2. Visualization, especially for RTi data and 3D models via online integrated players. Two thrusts: a) the development of live (online) viewers for high resolution images, panoramic photographs, RTi files and 3D models; and, b) the integration of dynamic generation of 3d models from sequences of specialized image files (e.g., RTi); and,

3. Data processing, mainly regarding Image Classification/Analysis.