Development of an e-content Platform for the cataloging of cultural assets and virtual exhibitions
The project
Infofactory, in collaboration with the Computer Laboratory for Historical Artistic Documentation of the University of Udine, has designed and developed an e-content platform (E-Dvara) dedicated to researchers and scholars to build digital archives of historical artistic material in a simple way and without any technical support.
The objective
Researchers in the humanities field require a very flexible system to build digital archives based on a free structure and with powerful search and display functions for data. The platform must be designed to allow users to be independent (i) in the creation of the structure of the archives, (ii) in defining the semantics of the fields, (iii) in defining the forms of search and display of data, (iv) in the activity of inserting content and materials (works, maps, etc.) and finally in (v) creating virtual exhibitions.
The Research Path
The activity is initially conducted by the staff of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Udine (now infoFactory staff) within the framework of a FIRB project ICT for EU-India Cross Cultural Dissemination (2004). The project led to the creation of a platform that has been subsequently reviewed and updated to this day.
Currently, e-Dvara is being used for numerous projects by various partners including (i) University of Udine, (ii) University of Urbino Carlo Bo, (iii) University of Foggia, (iv) Regional Directorate of Museums of Tuscany, (v) Memofonte Foundation, (vi) Cultural Consortium of Monfalconese.
Currently, the functionalities for the construction of interactive virtual exhibitions are being expanded.
The platform.architecture
In detail.
Architecture
e-Dvara allows you to manage any number of archiving projects. Each project can consist of one or more archives. Each archive can contain documents (works) structured according to specific templates composed of fields of different types. The content of the archives can be viewed through one or more views that the designer can build in a customized way.
Documents and Reports
Each document is stored in the archives and is based on a template. Moreover, it can have relationships with other documents.
Templates and fields
Every project has a space where the data structure (template) is created to be used for different documents.
The fields of a Template can be of different types and can be organized in nested structures.
Views
The flexibility of the front-end allows for the customization of document display, enabling the selection of fields to be displayed based on the specific structure of each document.
