Cultural Heritage and the Semantic Web

Visual mobile communication: Camera phone photographs in mobile messaging (Mikko Villi)

I concentrate on photo messages (photographs taken with a camera phone and sent to another mobile phone). A salient aspect is the convergence of phone and camera — the phone being a communication device intended mainly for interpersonal communication, and, on the other hand, the camera being a device devoid of any means to directly communicate with other people. From this disparity rises the central question in my research: How does the convergence of photography and mobile phone communication affect our communicational and photographic practices? More information (PDF)

Finnish CultureSampo: Cultural Heritage on the Semantic Web (Tuuka Ruotsala)

Cultural heritage has recently become an important application area for semantic technologies. The current semantic technologies enable powerful ontology-based search and browsing capabilities for digital collections. However, many bottlenecks of semantic systems can be identified:

1. quality of ontologies,
2. mediation of heterogeneous content, and
3. information visualization and access.

I will present the publication concept and the online semantic portal CultureSampo, a system of creating a collective semantic memory of cultural heritage on a national level.