The design and implementation of a repository for digital cultural artefacts

摘要

We motivate, describe and demonstrate a generic repository for visual material related to cultural disciplines such as architecture, art and heritage. The repository design abstracts from the requirements of particular tasks to implement a set of common features based on the metaphor of a gallery. In functional terms, galleries are spaces in which several roles play together to create the larger social entity we call a gallery. Curators organize and interpret collections. Exhibitors contribute and interpret collection material. Through their commentary, Critics relate Resources and Exhibition. Viewers visit galleries to read and make their own interpretations of the content therein. Our design provides for each of these roles and implements them as actions on five fundamental types of objects: Resources, Exhibitions, People, Works and Annotations. We describe the architecture of a system called A?VI?RE that supports the above four roles and five object types. Included in this design is a meta-metadata scheme that supports variation in descriptors across content types. A?VI?RE’s implementation is based on the open-source web portal system TikiWiki, providing opportunities for customization and integration with other open-source efforts. We describe a set of initial authoring styles for A?VI?RE Exhibitions. The paper concludes with hypotheses about the social and intellectual opportunities provided by the A?VI?RE functionality.