HITITE
From EuroVR Knowledge Base
- Full name
- Heritage Illustrated Thesaurus
- Acronym
- HITITE
- Website
- Keywords
- Innovation, Technology Transfer, Information, Media, Information Processing, Information Systems, Social Aspects
- Budget
- € 272929 EURO
- Start date
- 2001/10/01
- End date
- 2002/09/30
Contents |
Partners
- ADLIB INFORMATION SYSTEMS LIMITED: SUMMERS, Kyle
Funding Bodies
- EU FP5 / IST
Contact
- Gillian GRAYSON
- Tel: +44-17-93414845
- NATIONAL MONUMENTS RECORD,KEMBLE DRIVE SN2, 2GZ SWINDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Objectives
The aim of HITITE is to enable anyone interested in the historic environment to access and explore, remotely, information relating to sites and monuments without having to have specialist knowledge either of the heritage or thesauri. The project will build on existing knowledge and expertise within English Heritage and ADLIB Information Systems to develop a Heritage Illustrated Thesaurus, which will allow users to explore thesaurus terminology through images and Virtual Reality models. It will bring together specialists from different areas of expertise to assess the extent to which the existing technologies can be brought together to create a new and innovative product which can be offered as a practical solution to customers, as well as developing a robust methodology.
Objectives: The objectives of HITITE are to: 1) Develop an on-line thesaurus of monument terms illustrated with images from the NMR's archive 2) Assess the extent to which existing technologies (text databases, images and Virtual Reality) can be brought together to provide advanced and intuitive searching capabilities for image to text and text to image 3) Develop a new and innovative product by bringing together specialists from different areas of expertise (thesaurus creation, web design, image management and Virtual Reality) 4) Encourage wider access to heritage information by helping to unlock the information resources within the National Monuments Record, ranging from heritage professionals to school children 5) Encourage people to take greater interest in the historic environment, understand it better and protect it.
Work description: English Heritage's National Monuments Record has been developing text-based thesauri for over 20 years. The NMR has recently also been working with Virtual Reality interfaces to its heritage databases. These are intended to provide intuitive web-based access, less reliant on users keying in text entries. ADLIB is a specialist software company with substantial experience of thesaurus development, including multilingual and multimedia thesauri, e.g. the Australian Pictorial Thesaurus. Whereas traditional thesauri assume users have some prior knowledge of terminology associated with a monument and guide the user in the correct use of the term, the Heritage Illustrated Thesaurus will allow users to explore thesaurus terminology through images associated with monument terms; using photographs, drawings and Virtual Reality models to discover the correct term for the monument type. The proposed system will use textual metadata links to enable the end-user to navigate the system and discover images associated with terms, or terms associated with images using a minimum of key- strokes (wherever possible, navigation will be by mouse). To help the user navigate the hierarchy, the project will develop a series of 18 Virtual reality models as an interface to the top level broad terms in the thesaurus. Examples of these top-level terms include Defence, Ritual, Religious and Funerary etc. The Virtual Reality models constructed for each of these will allow the user to explore whether they are in the correct classification. Browsing the virtual world of the top-level category will allow the user to explore the scope of monument terms. For example, under Ritual, Religious and Funerary there will be examples of different types of religious structures (churches, stone circles etc), graves, statues and other iconography. These will be supported by text explanations of the Virtual Reality representations.
Milestones: 1. Project start-up with project management mechanisms and structures in place 2. Project methodology developed and evaluated 3. Prototype database developed and images and content loaded 4. Prototype interface developed 5. User evaluation completed and demonstrator developed 6. Launch and final review.
Main Results
End Users
Evaluation Methodologies
Fill with the evaluation methodologies. Evaluation methods already in the KB can be found in Category:Evaluation Methods
