Design and Implementation of a Multimedia Integrated Database of Archeological Sites on a Web Service Platform†

Cultural heritage has been gaining more importance in the recent years in combination with sophisticated yet effective computer vision techniques. As a consequence, archaeological data, both in textual and image forms, has been considered in the development of database models. Archaeological sites are the primary source of archaeological data, and the findings are the primary targets for storage, querying and retrieval as well as exchange through appropriate mediums. This paper introduces the basic design principles of multimedia integrated database of archaeological sites on a Web service platform. Web services provide a medium for integration of various archaeological resources that are available for querying through the Web. This platform also allows archaeological data exchange via querying mechanism. The Web service platform presented in this paper can be used by both archaeologists and non-technical users to query and retrieve archaeological information through various Web-accessible archaeological databases. Our work also focuses on supporting multimedia visual content-based queries for archaeological objects stored in databases. As an initial step, similarity search facility for image-based archaeological data is developed as an additional query task within our platform.