Visualizing Art History Doron Goldfarb Electronic Commerce Group VSEM – The Virtual 3D Social Experience Museum Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems Vienna University of Technology Favoritenstrasse 9-11/ Vienna. Austria/Europe Tel: +43 (1)

Art History as „Network of Relations“ Relations in tradition, influence, style and technique Relations between people ( teacher/student, patrons, collaborators, etc.) Geographical influences ( „Dutch Light“... ) General historical influences ( wars, different reigns etc. ) Last but not least: associative approaches 2

Diagrams of Art „Development“ 3

„Art Diagrams“ as Virtual Museum Layouts ? 4 Use existing semantic relationships Organize them to form “Narratives” and use them as base for automatic graph layouts 1 st example: Relationships between artists, their patrons etc.

Data Sources – Image Database Web Gallery of Art Provides information about ~ artworks by ~2.200 artists RAFFAELLO Sanzio; (b. 1483, Urbino, d. 1520, Roma); The Transfiguration; ;Oil on wood, 405 x 278 cm; Pinacoteca, Vatican; painting;religious;Italian;

Data Sources – Controlled Vocabularies 6 Getty Union List of Artist Names ( ULAN ) Structured vocabulary of artist names and biographical information Getty Arts & Architecture Thesaurus ( AAT ) Structured vocabulary of concepts relating to the fine arts, architecture and decorative arts Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names ( TGN ) Structured vocabulary of geographic names for indexing art and architecture

RDF Mapping between Image Metadata and Vocabularies 7

WGA RDF Dataset The Transfiguration Oil on wood x cm Vatican Pinacoteca WGA

The ClioPatria semantic search web-server 9 won the first prize at the Semantic Web Challenge at the 5th International Semantic Web Conference held in Athens, Georgia, USA. The MultimediaN E-culture project uses ClioPatria for thesaurus-based searching in heterogeneous cultural heritage collections The CATCH CHIP project uses ClioPatria to power the search engine underlying their Rijksmuseum art recommender and personalized museum tour guide Available under the GPL-2 license.

Search Graph... 10

... Becomes a Timeline Graph 11

Current Prototype 12 Translate the timeline graph into a 3D representation Use additional dimension to represent “influence” Code rank of artist node as height value Show relations as differently colored curves Show images and related metadata

Current Prototype 13

Current Prototype 14

Current Prototype 15

Outlook Dynamic Graph Drawing Multi User Visualization Different Narratives ( Geographical, User generated Tags ) Additional ( semantic ) datasources like Freebase and DBpedia ! EVALUATION ! 16

Thank you ! 17