About MultiMatch
The MultiMatch search engine will be able to:
- identify relevant material via an in-depth crawling of selected cultural heritage institutions,
accepting and processing any semantic web encoding of the information retrieved;
- crawl the Internet to identify websites with cultural heritage information, locating relevant texts, images and videos, regardless of the source and target languages used to write the query and/or describe the results;
- automatically classify the results in a semantic-web compliant
fashion, based on document content, its metadata, its context, and
on the occurrence of relevant CH concepts in the document, and automatically extract relevant information which will then be used
to create cross-links between related material, such as the biography of an artist, exhibitions of his/her work, critical analyses, etc.;
- organize and further analyse the material crawled to serve focused
queries generated from user-formulated information needs;
- interact with the user to obtain a more specific definition of
initial information requirements, and finally;
- organize and display search results in an integrated,
user-friendly manner, allowing users to access and exploit the
information retrieved regardless of language barriers.
The project’s R&D work is organized around three activities:
- User-oriented research activities will primarily investigate the user requirements and consequent definition of the required functionality of the system, content selection and preparation, studies on the ontologies adopted by cultural heritage institutions and the semantic encoding to be adopted by the system.
- System-oriented research activities include the study and development of software components for the acquisition, indexing, classification, retrieval and presentation of multilingual cultural heritage information in diverse and mixed media and their integration in the system prototypes.
- Validation activities will include testing of the system and its integrated components.
Project facts
Project type: STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project)
Contract number: 033104
Start date: 1 May 2006
Duration: 30 Months
Funding: € 3 114 000
Number of partners: Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell' Informazione, Consiglio Nazionale
delle Ricerche, Italy.
Contact: Dr Carol Peters, e-mail: carol@isti.cnr.it