A Multimedial Database System - Managing a Virtual Collection of Art and Architectural Works
نویسنده
چکیده
In 1993, The Faculty of Architecture and Fine Arts, Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile, decided to create a virtual collection of art and architectural master pieces, mainly of national and Latin American origin. The faculty does not own the works themselves, but a collection consisting of visual representations of each work, including drawings, video, slides and other audiovisual material. The initiative of assembling the collection is based on the difficulty of access to these works, spread over the world, as well as in the collection process and preservation of visual information consisting in original documents and architectural drawings, slides, photographs, and other visual media. This has been a difficult task due to the natural deterioration of this kind of media. The knowledge of masterpieces and work of outstanding artists and architects is a basic theme in the study and research in the Faculty. The access to a virtual collection of patrimonial work in these areas provides a new way of research with great impact in the education of students in our faculty as well as schools and other public institutions. Nowadays advances in technology make us think of a new way of preservation and retrieval of visual information. High quality images, hypermedia, communications and network technology, allow the retrieval of integrated information in different media including high quality still images, audio, video and text. Moreover, the significant growth observed in Internet and specially in the World Wide Web, constitutes apowerful media to provide worldwide access to multimedia1 information. The project, in development process, has the participation of amultidisciplinary team, administrated by the Art and Architecture Faculty. The National Art Museum is 0 Archives & Museum Informatics, 1995 3 9 Multimedia Computing and Museums ICHIM '95 MCN '95 collaborating with production tasks providing information and visual material of the collection and the relevant exhibitions that occur throughout the year. The cataloging process is being done by the university Library System experts. Software engineers from the university "Computing, Information and Communication Service" are in charge of all the technical issues and software development. The project is conceived in several stages, each of them concerned with technology evaluation and acquisition issues, software development and production tasks for collection and cataloguing of information. The first stage was concentrated in the analysis of the system information and hnctional requirements, considering the users' characteristics and needs. The design and development process focus in user-interface design aspects, data modeling, and evaluations of technology in image processing, file format standards, multimedial software development tools relational database servers, and client-server technology. A special emphasis has been made to have a graphical oriented, easy to use and intuitive interface to access the data, oriented to the viewing of images and providing flexible access to integrated information in several types of media. The database stores relevant information of art and architectural masterpieces. The user is allowed to search by several criteria and browse the information of the works and authors intuitively through a graphical oriented interface. This paper describes the design and development process of the multimedial database system built to manage and retrieve the virtual collection of art and architectural works. Design Considerations The following sections describe several aspects considered in the design process of the multimedial database system. The design process was done together with an evaluation of technology before the implementation stages began. User and Environment User characteristics as well as the environment certainly determine the system design. The study of the audience will provide some indications in the design process. Some of the user characteristics studied include heterogeneity, number of users involved, and their location. [Shwier R., Misanchuk E.]. Researchers, teachers and students of the Architecture and Fine Arts Faculty need to study masterpieces of artists and architects. The information about these works is widespread over the world, therefore, of difficult and sometimes restricted access. The Faculty is building an archive with the purpose to collect and preserve information of outstanding works. A virtual collection constitutes a O Archives & Museum Informatics, 1995 40 A Multimedia1 Database System powerful mean for research and teaching purposes, giving access to integrated information ofthe works in several media. On the other hand, the system will allow the access and manage the original sources collected in the archive. Other users from national and international institutions such as museums, libraries, universities and schools spread over the world will also have access to the virtual collection. The system developed will allow the knowledge of art pieces owned by museums, private institutions and collectionists, as well as outstanding architectural work. Therefore, the system will be used by a large, heterogeneous and dispersed audience, with little or no experience at all in computer systems. These characteristics lead us to consider the different needs of the audience for the type and focus in content, functionality of the system and user interface design. The following section describes in detail the information requirements of the multimedia1 database to represent integrally each of the art and architectural works in the virtual collection. Information Requirements The database will store mainly information of art and architecture representations in different media. All media stored should be acquired in a high quality, which demands a great amount in disk storage, fast compressionldecompression techniques, scaling facilities, and high transmission rates over the network. At this time it is difficult to estimate the final volume of information stored, the system is designed to store great amounts of images, with a natural growth considering access to several servers in multiple locations over a network. The information collected for Art and Architectural masterpieces is the following. Arts The faculty decided to collect at least one slide for each work, biography of the author and a list of bibliographic references. When needed (decided by an art expert) and if possible, a set of slides showing details of the work where provided for a complete study of it. or the study of each work, the faculty collected the following information: A set of 35 mm. slides of 4 pictures (average). This set includes 1 full view and 3 or 4 details for each work, as they were needed. In the future, a short video sequence will be provided for the study of the sculptures. O Archives & Museum Informatics, 1995 Multimedia Com~uting; and Museums ICHIM '95 MCN '95 A biography of the artist. A list of bibliographic references of the work.
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