Visualizing Art History

Doron Goldfarbdoron@ec.tuwien.ac.at

Electronic Commerce GroupVSEM – The Virtual 3D Social Experience Museum

Institute of Software Technology and Interactive SystemsVienna University of Technology

Favoritenstrasse 9-11/188-1 . 1040 Vienna . Austria/EuropeTel: +43 (1) 58801 - 18815

http://vsem.ec.tuwien.ac.at/

Art History as „Network of Relations“

Relations in tradition, influence, style and technique

Relations between people ( teacher/student, patrons, collaborators, etc.)

Geographical influences( „Dutch Light“ ... )

General historical influences( wars, different reigns etc. )

Last but not least: associative approaches

2

Diagrams of Art „Development“

3

„Art Diagrams“ as Virtual Museum Layouts ?

4

Use existing semantic relationships

Organize them to form “Narratives” and

use them as base for automatic graph layouts

1st example: Relationships between artists, their patrons etc.

Data Sources – Image DatabaseWeb Gallery of Art

Provides information about ~17.000 artworks by ~2.200 artists

RAFFAELLO Sanzio;(b. 1483, Urbino, d. 1520, Roma);The Transfiguration;1518-20;Oil on wood, 405 x 278 cm;Pinacoteca, Vatican;http://www.wga.hu/html/r/raphael/5roma/5/10trans.htmlpainting;religious;Italian;1501-1550

Data Sources – Controlled Vocabularies

6

Getty Union List of Artist Names ( ULAN )Structured vocabulary of artist names and biographical information

Getty Arts & Architecture Thesaurus ( AAT )Structured vocabulary of concepts relating to the fine arts, architecture and decorative arts

Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names ( TGN )Structured vocabulary of geographic names for indexing art and architecture

RDF Mapping between Image Metadata and Vocabularies

7

WGA RDF Dataset

8

<rdf:Description rdf:about="&wga;15104"> <vra:creator rdf:resource="&ulan;500023578"/>

<vra:date.beginning>1518-01-01</vra:date.beginning> <vra:date.completion>1520-12-31</vra:date.completion>

<vra:title>The Transfiguration</vra:title> <vra:material>Oil on wood</vra:material> <vra:measurements.dimensions>405.0 x

278.0</vra:measurements.dimensions> <vra:measurements.formats>cm</vra:measurements.formats> <vra:location.currentSite> Vatican</vra:location.currentSite> <vra:location.currentSite rdf:resource="&tgn;None"/> <vra:location.currentRepository>Pinacoteca</vra:location.currentRepository>

<vra:type rdf:resource="&aat;300033618"/> <vra:subject rdf:resource="&aat;300248179"/> <vra:culture rdf:resource="&aat;300111198"/> <rdf:type rdf:resource="&vra;Work"/>

</rdf:Description>

<rdf:Description rdf:about="&wgaimg;/r/raphael/5roma/5/10trans.jpg"> <vra:relation.depicts rdf:resource="&wga;15104"/> <vra:source>WGA</vra:source> <rdf:type rdf:resource="&vra;Image"/></rdf:Description>

The ClioPatria semantic search web-server

9

http://e-culture.multimedian.nl

won the first prize at the Semantic Web Challenge at the 5th International Semantic Web Conference held in Athens, Georgia, USA.

The MultimediaN E-culture project uses ClioPatria for thesaurus-based searching in heterogeneous cultural heritage collections

The CATCH CHIP project uses ClioPatria to power the search engine underlying their Rijksmuseum art recommender and personalized museum tour guide

Available under the GPL-2 license.

Search Graph ...

10

... Becomes a Timeline Graph

11

Current Prototype

12

Translate the timeline graph into a 3D representation

Use additional dimension to represent “influence”

Code rank of artist node as height value

Show relations as differently colored curves

Show images and related metadata

Current Prototype

13

Current Prototype

14

Current Prototype

15

Outlook Dynamic Graph Drawing

Multi User Visualization

Different Narratives ( Geographical, User generated Tags )

Additional ( semantic ) datasources like Freebase and DBpedia

! EVALUATION !

16

Thank you !

17