The Indiana MAS Project: Goals and Preliminary Results

The Indiana MAS project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research “Futuro in Ricerca 2010” program, aims at providing a framework for the digital protection and conservation of rock art natural and cultural heritage sites, by storing, organizing and presenting information about them in such a way to encourage scientific research and to raise the interest and sensibility towards them from the common people. The project involves two research units, namely Genova (Dipartimento di Informatica, Bioingegneria, Robotica e Ingegneria dei Sistemi) and Salerno (Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica), for a period of 36 months, starting from march 8th, 2012. The technologies adopted in the project range from agents to ontologies, as requested by the complex nature of the platform, where each module is devoted to a specific task: sketch and symbol recognition, semantic interpretation of complex visual scenes, multi-language text understanding, storing, classification and indexing of multimedia and heterogeneous digital objects. All of them should cooperate and coordinate in order to enable higher level components to reason on them and to detect relationships among different digital objects, hence providing new hypothesis based on such relationships.