Ontologies have been used to describe cultural objects, such as artifacts, by their physical or media specific properties, or by the life cycle of the objects in collections. In contrast, this paper discusses the problem of creating ontological descriptions that allow describing different kinds of cultural content through the situations and actions that take place in the real world. This point ...

INTRODUCTION Humans are well adapted to their social environments. Experimental evidence suggests that humans are either born with, or quickly learn, the necessary affective and cognitive processes that allow them to recognize others, and to understand their mental states and social behavior. Mori’s (1970) proposal of an uncanny valley, which describes affective response as a function of distan...

In this paper, we focus on embodiment aspects of communication between human and single function artifact. Communication with embodiment media between human and artifact is difficult because of the difference of embodiment. We discuss a bottom up process and top down process of designing a common understand of embodiment media between human and artifact. keywords: human-artifact communication, ...

Cultural transmission is essentially the idea that beliefs and values are passed from generation to generation. The question I would like to address in this paper is how does this happen? In particular, what is the mechanism? In the absence of a deep understanding of the process by which people come to have similar ideas, a variety of metaphors have been used. The purpose of this paper is to ou...

This paper interweaves the notions of distributed intelligence and scaffolding with fading in discussing the nature of the modes of use of artifacts as tools, particularly computational artifacts. We introduce the notions of tools for living and tools for learning as parts of a framework for evaluating how artifacts are used and as broad guidelines for the design of artifacts. The tools concept...

This paper looks back at 1970’s modeling initiatives in archaeology in order to draw parallels with current initiatives on applying Semantic Web techniques to cultural artifacts. At those times, epistemological criticisms were raised on the lack of consideration by these models of the semiotic value of cultural artifacts. Based on these arguments, we propose several design perspectives for comp...