Enabling Semantic Access to Cultural Heritage: A Case Study of Tate Online

Transcription

1 Enabling Semantic Access to Cultural Heritage: A Case Study of Tate Online Paul Clough, Jennifer Marlow and Neil Ireson University of Sheffield (UK)

2 Contents of paper 2 Contents Introduction Related work Methodology Results Discussion Conclusion

3 3 Contents Introduction Related work Methodology Results Discussion Conclusion

4 4 Introduction Cultural heritage material often contains/exhibits rich semantic information New developments in technologies (e.g. Semantic Web) can provide more sophisticated information access e.g. faceted browsing enables users to broaden/narrow search based on multiple criteria at once But we need to find out how cultural heritage institutions can make use of such technologies We explore the use of Semantic Web technologies for information from Tate Online (a large online art collection)

5 5 Related work Semantic Web (Maedche & Staab; Hildebrand et al.) Semantic descriptions can facilitate finding, integrating and connecting information Implications for interface design (e.g. use of clustered results, tag clouds, cluster maps, timelines and maps) Semantics are highly valuable in the humanities domain (Benjamins et al., Hyvönen) Most information seeking in this domain involves events, persons and movements in a historical or cultural context Research projects such as MultimediaN and echase have explored semantic enrichment of cultural resources

6 6 Aims of current research To explore the feasibility (and potential uses) of semantic organisation in the context of a larger (and realistic) online art collection With emphasis on different types of task and user Experimenting with a faceted browsing interface To provide a prototype system for Tate Online based on exploiting current available Semantic Web technologies Basis for future exploration and collaboration with Tate Online

7 7 Tate Online

8 8 Methodology Questionnaire published on Tate Online to target site visitors Used to gather information on users typical tasks and needs when searching the site for material related to artists and artworks Design of prototype faceted browsing system Task-based evaluation of prototype With users exhibiting similar characteristics to Tate Online visitors Four types of task to evaluate various information seeking behaviour (c.f. Shneiderman)

9 9 Tate Online questionnaire (1) 635 individuals (worldwide) answered online questionnaire Reasons for using Tate Online 42% for professional/academic research 34% personal interest What users were doing Roughly 2/3 of people looking for something specific artist (45%) or artwork (19%) or both (12%) 14% looked for types of artworks (e.g. expressionism, portrait) 10% were just browsing the collection

10 10 Tate Online questionnaire (2) Most important criteria when searching for artworks or artists (overall) Subjects of artworks (45%) Relationships between artists (31%) Dates (13%) Similar ranking or criteria between general and expert users Most important ways of enhancing access to material Faceted browse (26.2%) Relationships between artists (22.9%) Links in English (17.4%) Dates on a timeline (15.3%)

11 11 Prototype design Content Crawled material from Tate Online using custom wrappers Derived from Tate Collection 3,000 artists names, birth/death dates/places 30,000 artworks titles, subjects Linked together Tate Collection and ULAN 100,000 artists (names, nationality, birth and death dates/places, role, gender, relationships) Become facets for exploration

12 12 Prototype design Demonstrator Faceted browsing functionality Implemented using Simile Exhibit toolkit from MIT Content can be accessed using one of four views Artist view (search artists and titles of artworks) Artwork view (more information on artworks and artwork thumbnails) Timeline view of artists birth/death dates Map view of artist s birth places Results displayed in view are constrained by values in both artist and artwork facets Limited support for exploring relationships

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17 17 Results of user evaluation 14 individuals participated in task-based user evaluation Similar characteristics to Tate Online users (both with and without specialised artistic knowledge) Users performed 4 search tasks (1 for each type of search) for each system (faceted browser and Tate Online) Task type Specific fact-finding Extended fact-finding Open-ended browsing Exploration Example How many works by Henry Bishop are in the collection? Which of the following artists lived during the same time period? Find as many artists as you can who lived between 1800 and Find an abstract painting that you like in the collection

18 18 Results of user evaluation Mean ratings of difficulty and time taken (mins) to complete task, by task type Task type Mean rating (1 = not difficult; 7 = very difficult) Time taken (Faceted browser) Time taken (Tate) Significance (2-tailed t test) Specific fact-finding Extended fact-finding Open-ended browsing* * (p<0.05) Exploration *Users were given a maximum of 5 minutes to complete this task Users found the exploration task the hardest Users were generally faster at finding relevant material using faceted browser than Tate Online (only significant for open-ended browsing task)

19 19 Results of user evaluation Percent of participants using (at least once) available functionality Task type Artist/Artwork Search Facets Timeline View Artwork View Artwork Subjects/ Keywords Specific fact-finding Extended fact-finding Open-ended browsing Exploration Task type affects search strategies employed and features used Facets used by some people for all tasks Searching used more for simple fact-finding Different features are useful for different information needs

20 20 Results of user evaluation System preference Task type Percent preferring Faceted Browser Percent preferring Tate Online Percent with no preference Specific fact-finding Extended fact-finding Open-ended browsing Exploration Faceted browser implementation viewed as equally or more preferable than current Tate site Dependent (again) on the type of search task Faceted browsing task was biased slightly towards faceted browser s functionalities

21 21 Conclusions Users of cultural heritage sites (e.g. Tate Online) have varying information seeking needs Depends upon levels of domain expertise and reasons for visiting a site Exploiting semantic information is useful in the cultural heritage domain Faceted browsing may be useful to find specific type of information or narrow down a search Appears most useful for open-ended browsing tasks Different features are useful for different information needs Success of semantic information access relies heavily on underlying techniques to extract and associate semantic information E.g. coverage and accuracy of resources such as ULAN

22 22 Future work Further development of the prototype system Allow for more extensive exploration of relationships More extensive user experiments Consider the role of the user s domain expertise Involve larger numbers of expert users Further exploration of task type and functionality which best supports different types of information need Work funded by

23 Questions?

24 24 References Benjamins, V.R., Contreras, J., Blazquez, M., Dodero, J.M., Garcia, A., Navas, E., Hernandez, F., & Wert, C. (2004). Cultural heritage and the semantic web. Proceedings of 1st European Semantic Web Symposium, Hildebrand, M., van Ossenbruggen, J., & Hardman, L. (2007). An analysis of search-based user interaction on the semantic web: Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica. Hyvönen, E. (2007). Semantic portals for cultural heritage, (Accessed 2 June 2008.). Maedche, A., & Staab, S. (2002). Applying semantic web technologies for tourism information systems. 9th International Conference for information and communication technologies in tourism (Enter-2002), Shneiderman, B. (1998). Designing information-abundant web sites: issues and recommendations. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 47(1), 5-29.