Annotating illuminated manuscripts: an effective tool for research and education

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to report the research results of an ongoing project that deals with the exploitation of a digital archive of drawings and illustrations of historic documents for research and educational purposes. According to the results on a study of user requirements, we have designed tools to provide researchers with innovative ways for accessing the digital manuscripts, sharing, and transferring knowledge in a collaborative environment. We have found that the results of scientific research on the relationships between images of manuscripts produced over the centuries can be rendered explicit by using annotations. For this purpose, a taxonomy for linking annotation is introduced, together with a conceptual schema which represents annotations and links them to digital objects.

REFERENCES

• 1: Maristella Agosti , Fabio Crestani , Massimo Melucci, On the use of information retrieval techniques for the automatic construction of hypertext, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.33 n.2, p.133-144, March 1997 [doi>10.1016/S0306-4573(96)00058-1]
• 2: M. Agosti, L. Benfante, and N. Orio. IPSA: A Digital Archive of Herbals to Support Scientific Research. In T. M. T. Sembok, H. B. Zaman, H. Chen, S. R. Urs, and S. H. Myaeng, editors, Proc. 6th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries. Digital Libraries -- Digital Libraries: Technology and Management of Indigenous Knowledge (ICADL 2003), pages 253--264. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 2911, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, 2003.
• 3: M. Agosti, F. Bombi, M. Melucci, and G. Mian. Towards a digital library for the Venetian music of the eighteenth century. In J. Anderson, M. Deegan, S. Ross, and S. Harold, editors, DRH 98: Selected papers from Digital Resources for the Humanities, pages 1--16. Office for Humanities Communication, 2000.
• 4: Maristella Agosti , Fabio Crestani , Massimo Melucci, On the use of information retrieval techniques for the automatic construction of hypertext, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.33 n.2, p.133-144, March 1997 [doi>10.1016/S0306-4573(96)00058-1]
• 5: M. Agosti and N. Ferro. Annotations: Enriching a Digital Library. In T. Koch and I. T. Sølvberg, editors, Proc. 7th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2003), pages 88--100. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 2769, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, 2003.
• 6: M. Agosti and N. Ferro. Annotations as Context for Searching Documents. In F. Crestani and I. Ruthven, editors, Proc. 5th International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science -- Context: nature, impact and role, (in print), 2005.
• 7: M. Agosti, N. Ferro, I. Frommholz, and U. Thiel. Annotations in Digital Libraries and Collaboratories -- Facets, Models and Usage. In R. Heery and L. Lyon, editors, Proc. 8th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2004), pages 244--255. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 3232, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, 2004.
• 8: M. Agosti, N. Ferro, and N. Orio. Annotations as a Support to Research Users. In Proc. 7th International Workshop of the EU Network of Excellence DELOS on Audio-Visual Content and Information Visualization in Digital Libraries (AVIVDiLib'05), (in print), 2005.
• 9: James Allan, Automatic hypertext link typing, Proceedings of the the seventh ACM conference on Hypertext, p.42-52, March 16-20, 1996, Bethesda, Maryland, United States [doi>10.1145/234828.234833]
• 10: T. Berners-Lee, R. Fielding, U. C. Irvine, and L. Masinter. Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax. RFC 2396, August 1998.
• 11: Paolo Bottoni , Roberta Civica , Stefano Levialdi , Laura Orso , Emanuele Panizzi , Rosa Trinchese, MADCOW: a multimedia digital annotation system, Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, May 25-28, 2004, Gallipoli, Italy [doi>10.1145/989863.989870]
• 12: P. Bottoni , M. F. Costabile , P. Mussio, Specification and dialogue control of visual interaction through visual rewriting systems, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.21 n.6, p.1077-1136, Nov. 1999 [doi>10.1145/330643.330644]
• 13: P. Bottoni, S. Levialdi, and P. Rizzo. An Analysis and Case Study of Digital Annotation. In N. Bianchi-Berthouze, editor, Proc. 3rd International Workshop on Databases in Networked Information Systems (DNIS 2003), pages 216--230. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 2822, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, 2003.
• 14: J. H. Coombs, Hypertext, full text, and automatic linking, Proceedings of the 13th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.83-98, September 05-07, 1990, Brussels, Belgium [doi>10.1145/96749.98010]
• 15: Gregory Crane, Cultural Heritage Digital Libraries: Needs and Components, Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, p.626-637, September 16-18, 2002
• 16: S. J. DeRose, Expanding the notion of links, Proceedings of the second annual ACM conference on Hypertext, p.249-257, November 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/74224.74245]
• 17: Abbe Don , Laura Teodosio , Joe Lambert , Dana Atchley, From generation to generation: multimedia, community and personal stories, Proceedings of the second ACM international conference on Multimedia, p.337, October 15-20, 1994, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/192593.192691]
• 18: Daniela Fogli , Giuseppe Fresta , Piero Mussio, On electronic annotation and its implementation, Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, May 25-28, 2004, Gallipoli, Italy [doi>10.1145/989863.989877]
• 19: I. Frommholz, H. Brocks, U. Thiel, E. Neuhold, L. Iannone, G. Semeraro, M. Berardi, and M. Ceci. Document-Centered Collaboration for Scholars in the Humanities -- The COLLATE System. In T. Koch and I. T. Sølvberg, editors, Proc. 7th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2003), pages 434--445. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 2769, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, 2003.
• 20: I. Frommholz, U. Thiel, and T. Kamps. Annotation-based Document Retrieval with Four-Valued Probabilistic Datalog. In R. Baeza-Yates, Y. Maarek, T. Roelleke, and A. P. de Vries, editors, Proc. 3rd XML and Information Retrieval Workshop and the 1st Workshop on the Integration of Information Retrieval and Databases (WIRD2004), pages 31--38. http://homepages.cwi.nl/~arjen/wird04/wird04-proceedings.pdf {last visited 2005, April 5}, 2004.
• 21: Henry M. Gladney , Fred Mintzer , Fabio Schiattarella , Julián Bescós , Martin Treu, Digital access to antiquities, Communications of the ACM, v.41 n.4, p.49-57, April 1998 [doi>10.1145/273035.273048]
• 22: B. Gueye, P. Rigaux, and N. Spyratos. Taxonomy-Based Annotation of XML Documents: Application to eLearning Resources. In G. A. Vouros and T. Panayiotopoulos, editors, Proc. 3rd Helenic Conference on AI -- Methods and Applications of Artificial Intelligence (SETN 2004), pages 33--42. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 3025, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, 2004.
• 23: José Kahan , Marja-Ritta Koivunen, Annotea: an open RDF infrastructure for shared Web annotations, Proceedings of the 10th international conference on World Wide Web, p.623-632, May 01-05, 2001, Hong Kong, Hong Kong [doi>10.1145/371920.372166]
• 24: Daryl T. Lawton , Ian E. Smith, The Knowledge Weasel hypermedia annotation system, Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on Hypertext, p.106-117, November 14-18, 1993, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/168750.168793]
• 25: Catherine C. Marshall, Annotation: from paper books to the digital library, Proceedings of the second ACM international conference on Digital libraries, p.131-140, July 23-26, 1997, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/263690.263806]
• 26: Catherine C. Marshall, Toward an ecology of hypertext annotation, Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia : links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems: links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems, p.40-49, June 20-24, 1998, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/276627.276632]
• 27: Catherine C. Marshall , A.J. Bernheim Brush, From personal to shared annotations, CHI '02 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA [doi>10.1145/506443.506610]
• 28: Catherine C. Marshall , A. J. Bernheim Brush, Exploring the relationship between personal and public annotations, Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, June 07-11, 2004, Tuscon, AZ, USA [doi>10.1145/996350.996432]
• 29: Massimo Melucci , Nicola Orio, Combining melody processing and information retrieval techniques: methodology, evaluation, and system implementation, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, v.55 n.12, p.1058-1066, October 2004 [doi>10.1002/asi.20058]
• 30: G. Neve and N. Orio. Indexing and retrieval of music documents through pattern analysis and data fusion techniques. In X. Serra and M. Leman, editors, Proc. 5th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2004), pages 216--223. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2004.
• 31: Nicola Orio, Alignment of Performances with Scores Aimed at Content-Based Music Access and Retrieval, Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, p.479-492, September 16-18, 2002
• 32: N. Paskin, editor. The DOI Handbook -- Edition 4.2.0. International DOI Foundation (IDF). http://www.doi.org/hb.html {last visited 2005, April 5}, February 2005.
• 33: P. Rigaux and N. Spyratos. Metadata Inference for Document Retrieval in a Distributed Repository. In M. J. Maher, editor, Proc. 9th Asian Computing Science Conference -- Advances in Computer Science (ASIAN 2004) -- Higher Decision Making. Dedicated to Jean-Louis Lassez on the Occasion of His 5th Cycle Birthday, pages 418--436. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 3321, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, 2004.
• 34: Takeshi Sannomiya , Toshiyuki Amagasa , Masatoshi Yoshikawa , Shunsuke Uemura, A framework for sharing personal annotations on web resources using XML, Proceedings of the workshop on Information technology for virtual enterprises, p.40, January 29-30, 2001, Queensland, Australia
• 35: F. Shipman, M. N. Price, C. C. Marshall, and G. Golovchinsky. Identifying Useful Passages in Documents based on Annotation Patterns. In T. Koch and I. T. Sólvberg, editors, Proc. 7th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2003), pages 101--112. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 2769, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, 2003.
• 36: Ulrich Thiel , Holger Brocks , Ingo Frommholz , Andrea Dirsch-Weigand , Jürgen Keiper , Adelheit Stein , Erich J. Neuhold, COLLATE – A collaboratory supporting research on historic European films, International Journal on Digital Libraries, v.4 n.1, p.8-12, August 2004 [doi>10.1007/s00799-003-0069-1]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.7 Digital Libraries
          Subjects: Systems issues

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
annotation, digital images, education environment, user requirements