The 4CH Knowledge Base is an information system and a smart catalog, equipped with advanced semantic functionalities, in which the description and metadata of all the documentation and data relevant to 4CH and its purposes, generated within the project or present in different systems and repositories, is indexed, integrated and efficiently organised.
The KB is intended to implement a centralised hub to provide a single access point to information relevant to the 4CH Competence Center and for all scholars and experts involved in the study, conservation, preservation and valorisation of Cultural Heritage.
The aim is to create a system in which high-quality metadata, integrated and organised according to an efficient and comprehensive ontology, are queried and used to provide valuable answers to relevant scientific questions and to retrieve resources essential for research activity.
List of resource types that will be made available through the Knowledge Base:
Heritage entities documentation
Historical and literary documentation
Archaeological and artistic information
Historical maps, drawings
Stories & Storytelling
Heritage Science documentation
Scientific analysis
Scientific reports
Scientific results
Scientific protocols
Conservation and restoration
Restoration techniques
Material reference collections
Risk management data
Statics and construction
Conservation states
Actor information
People
Institutions
Roles
Training and courses
Available courses
Training material
Training formats
Geographic data
GIS systems
Other spatial information
Other documentation
Methodologies and procedures
Best practices
Policies and governance
Economy and finance
Legal aspects
Licensing and Intellectual Property
Standards and models
Ontologies
Metadata models
Vocabularies and thesauri
Linguistic resources
Mappings
Other semantic resources
Digital objects and tools
3D Models
Images
Texts
Videos, audios and multimedia
Graphics
Augmented /Virtual reality
BIM/H-BIM
Software
Databases/Archives
Services
Pilots
Linked initiatives
European and international projects
Safeguarding programmes
Weather forecast
Earth & environment data
Climate change impact
Risk maps
IoT data
Web services developed within the 4CH project
This service guides users in the choice of the best technique or technological solution to be applied in their specific use-case, in the fields:
- Digitization and 3D modeling
- Conservation and preservation
It has been developed within the task T1.3 of the project, dedicated to the survey of the technology applied in the three operational fields of the Competence Centre:
- Digitization and 3D modeling,
- Conservation and preservation
- Valorisation of cultural heritage assets
The service allows users to interactively browse the deliverable D1.1 by answering some questions and be redirected to the best techniques for their purpose. In addition to the description of the suggested techniques, information on guidelines and best practices will be integrated.
This services is developed within the context of T3.5, Big Data Services; it aims to furnish a real-time, online web-based graphical monitoring services for environmental risk on cultural heritage buildings or archeological sites.
It shows real time data on Earthquakes; the data are automatically fetched via the INGV public API (http://webservices.ingv.it/fdsnws/event/1/); at the same time, few CH sites are shown:
- All the Unesco sites indicised in WikiData, which can be regarded as either a building or an archeological site
- The Italian National Heritige indicised in WikiData which can be regarded as buildings.
Up to May, 1st, 2023, an additional visualisation layer was developed. It used the twitter public API to fetch for messages about Earthquakes, Tsunami, Vandalism, Fire, and other risks on Cultural Heritage, using a Natural Language Processing tool for extracting information out of the tweet text and metadata.
Services provided by the start-up Inception
Inception spin off preserves, valorises and implements the cultural and architectural heritage with the latest digital technologies.
The spin-off offers different services due to the presence of various professionals capable of developing at multiple project scales and from different disciplinary angles multiple activities.
Example of Integrated services offered by 4CH partners
Services provided by the Digital Laboratories of the Cultural Heritage Network of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics.
THESPIAN (Tools for HEritage Science Processing, Integration, and ANalysis) is a cloud system offering multiple microservices to the researchers of the INFN network devoted to the development and application of technologies to Cultural Heritage.
The idea behind the Digital Heritage Laboratory is to furnish to researchers of the network a set of digital tools (corredated by a set of digital infrastructures) to help them store everything regarding their work (raw data, elaborated data, reports, documentations, etc.) and later on reaccess it.
On top of that, a list of microservices are built to facilitate the scientific work of the researchers, allowing them to (re)analyse their data, as well as the data of all members of the collaboration, all digitally, all done via the services of the DHLab.
It consists in a web platform for assisted metadata generation and a server service for persistent storage of scientific data and their metadata. The goal of THESPIAN-Mask service is to offer a cloud environment possessing a multitude of web applications for the storage of (meta)data and their use, in light of the FAIR principles; in particular, the idea is to allow researchers to store their raw data, processed data, results, documentation and article preprints, together on the cloud, with a set of metadata based on a common, shared ontology. The system also allows data and metadata to be accessed by other researchers of the network and (re)used via a set of commonly shared web services, offered entirely on the cloud. The CHNet DHLab cloud thus constitutes a cloud for cooperative data storage and data elaboration of scientific analysis on Cultural Heritage. The use of CRMhs also makes the information fully interoperable with other CIDOC CRM compatible data and allows their integration in existing cloud environments and extended semantic graphs, such as the semantic data cloud developed by ARIADNEplus for archaeological data.
It is a cloud-based Natural Language Processing tool, intended for processing textual reports. THESPIAN-NER can be also used to produce semantic metadata ready to be integrated with information coming from different domains. THESPIAN-NER, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool for automatic Named Entity Recognition (NER) using deep learning techniques, was developed. It allows users to automatically annotate archeological documents written in Italian (either .txt or .pdf files) by identifying and labelling relevant semantic entities in the text, extract and define new metadata for the annotated documents out of them, and using them for building custom queries to fetch related records available on the CHNet database.
Web tool for macro-XRF analysis. It allows users to fetch the XRF raw data in HDF5 format from the server, or to import their own, and retrieve both the histogram of the XRF counts and the XRF Image, shown in interactive plots that allow users to easily interact with the data representation and modify it, by adjusting all the various parameters. The raw data file content is a dictionary with key “img” and value the rank-3 tensor of shape (height, width, channel depth) representing the image.
Web tool for pre-analysis of AMS raw data.