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ACIS: Afghan Community Information System for Cultural Heritage Management
Overview1. Introduction Cultural heritage worldwide faces damages resulting from the nature and human. The problem is especially severe in Afghanistan during the civil war and Taliban regime in the last 20 years. Since Afghanistan was on the way to democracy, many organizations around the word have made great effort to make up for the break of cultural heritage management there. Under the appeals and guidance of UNESCO, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) Germany cooperates with Department of Urban History (Prof. Dr. Jansen), RWTH Aachen University to recover the cultural heritage. Cultural heritage management includes documentation, evaluation of conservation measures and execution of measures etc. Therefore, along with the practical conservation work, the department had developed an MS Access-based database application for documentation. However, the limitations of the existing personal database management system cause problems during its use. . We solve these problems in tight cooperation with the Department of Urban History and the Department of Information Systems and Database Technology (Prof. Dr. Jarke), RWTH Aachen by the creation of a sustainable business application. Our
aim is to
provide communities with a cheap, long-lasting, and flexible mobile
business application environment allowing them to build up the disaster
struck area more or less self-organizing. Additionally, networked experts
from all over the world may contribute to the overall process without
requiring them to be physically present. Our main work has been focusing on four major aspects. First, a great amount of information including spatial information, text documents, pictures, and audio-visual data needs to be managed for information search, retrieval and exchange. Second, many researchers and scientists working in this field are resided all over the world needing a channel to communicate and cooperate. Third, intergenerational cooperation is required, because no cultural heritage management work was done over two decades on site in Afghanistan resulting in a gap between the experiences accumulated by the prior generations and those collected newly. Finally, the information need to be shared by various organizations and individuals in fields such as tourism, museums, e-learning etc. 2. Concepts and Requirements Analysis ACIS
proposes a trust building community approach that
provides users in whatever country all over the world an option for a
sustainable relief work by means of information systems. With regard to the existing problems in the MS Access-based application,
the new system, ·
Community:
The
potential users come from three sectors: Government
and administration sector such as members of UNESCO, Research sector such as students and lecturers of different majors,
and Preservation sector such as
engineers and scientists in the cultural heritage conservation field. The
concept of a community of practice (s. [1]) provides diverse communication
channels for an intra-generational and intergenerational, as well as
intra- and interdisciplinary cooperation. · Geographic Information System (GIS): A great amount of information stored in the database pertains to sites and monuments in Afghanistan and has their geographic location information. Textual information alone with latitude and longitude input can not represent the spatial information properly and efficiently. Thus, GPS and the significant open geospatial standards implemented by OGC (s. [2] [3]) make contributions to construct a GIS supported by cartography and spatial queries. ·
Multimedia
standards:
A hard problem in this area is how to manage and search and
retrieve the multimedia information, mainly many photos, efficiently. Hence, the modern
multimedia database technology and metadata standards could make
contributions. Metadata might be categorized as metadata for
encoding/decoding, for interaction, for description, and for access and
delivery. The multimedia description standards such as MPEG-7 (s. [4])
could be the solution to enhance multimedia information retrieval and
exchange. ·
Cultural
heritage management:
The cultural heritage object should be represented and described in detail
precisely in order to be managed and searched in an easy way. Several
eminent metadata standards in this field are core data index, core data
standard and object ID defined by Getty Institute (s. [5]). They are
defined for historic building, monuments and archaeological sites and
movable cultural heritage objects respectively and implemented in XML. Related work surveyed focus only on selected parts of the related
technologies. ACIS tries to become a pioneer work extended to all
the four concepts. In workshops with architects from Department of Urban
History and art historians from the seminar of Oriental Art History at
Bonn University, the requirements of ACIS concerned with the
aforementioned concepts can be concluded as follows: In the aspect of community, the input user interface should be as
simple as possible. Multi-language-interface and multi-user-interface are
supported for users in different countries and for users working in
different disciplines. Users can communicate with each other via email and
forum service. And the community activities are warranted by users’
rights management. In the aspect of GIS, certain search catalogue
should be defined for sites and monuments. The query results can also be
displayed in maps that are generated dynamically. Graphic spatial query
tool need to be developed to support user interactive queries on the maps
straightly. Spatial data should be input into the database with simple
mechanism. In the aspect of multimedia, suitable metadata standards
will be used to enhance multimedia information search and retrieval. In
the aspect of cultural heritage management, thesaurus mediation
service could be launched to enhance the interoperability among users
working in different disciplines using different terminologies. 3. System Design and Implementation The data model is the starting point of the whole system design, and it
is especially important for the database design that follows an entity
relationship diagram. The main entities illustrated in Fig. 1 are Object
including Geo-object and cultural Item, Source
including Document and Event which consists of Fieldwork
and Snapshot, and Media that represents different multimedia
such as image, video etc. That Each Object could have many Media
which comes from certain Source is the strongest relationship in
the data model. In addition, many other entities are aggregated with the
three main entities. Especially, the Person entity composed of User
and Non-user is the actuator of Source, who could be
involved in a fieldwork, the author of a written document or an ACIS User.
Users may have Collection of their own interest and their Behavior
on cultural objects and multimedia may be traced. Figure 2: Data modeling of ACIS This data model is implemented with distributed web architecture depicted in Fig. 3. This open system architecture in a three-tier model was designed based on use case analysis. The front-end user interfaces composed of graphic user interface for different usage use the packages of the business logic layer which access the back-end database through the database interface. The middle tier consists of an application server, a web map server, and a metadata sever. With this distributed system architecture, such a use scenarios can be illustrated. The databases might be maintained in Department of Information Systems at RWTH Aachen University. Meanwhile, the application server might run in the newly established modern computer centre in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. On-site findings at a historic site can be input into a laptop immediately and stored locally, in case that Internet is unavailable. Later it can be synchronized with the database in Aachen through the web server.
Figure 3: System design in 3-tier distributed web architecture According to the database and system design, it was implemented with Oracle database technologies that consist of spatial, multimedia and XML database technologies. Correspondingly, Oracle Spatial, Oracle Intermedia and Oracle XML database utilities have been surveyed closely and applied partly. After the database was established, the original data stored in the MS Access database was migrated into the new database with SQL scripts in a semi-automated way. Java technologies such as Java Servlet, JSP and Java Applet have been applied for the prototype implementation. We focus on further exploration of the potential application area (s. Fig. 4). ACIS can be applied for cultural heritage management not only in Afghanistan, but also worldwide. In addition, its open architecture allows an easy adaptability for various other multimedia based business applications. For instance, the concepts of ACIS might also be integrated in advanced tourism information systems by a transfer of its multimedia content requiring only minor adaptations in the existing architecture. In future, mobile network and GPS technologies will be utilized to a greater extent.
On the other hand, ACIS
is also applicable as resource provider for any purpose of education and
research. It can serve
as a platform for intergenerational learning between the senior and young
professionals in Afghanistan, as well as for inter-cultural
cooperation.
Figure 4: Further development fields of ACIS
Generally speaking, the outcomes of the ACIS show that the concept of a community business application is promising for a sustainable relief process. We are working on the conception of ACIS in the theoretical level. At the same time, we are making the system development, roll-out in Afghanistan and evaluation in the practical level. 5. References
[1] E. Wenger: Communities of Practice:
Learning, Meaning and Identity. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1998.
[2] Open GIS Abstract Specification:
OpenGIS Metadata, 2000, http://www.opengis.org/docs/01-111.pdf
[3] Open GIS Consortium Inc.: OpenGIS Web
Map Server Cookbook version 1.0.1, Editor: Kris Kolodziej, August 2003.
[4] ISO/IEC: MPEG-7 Overview, March 2003,
http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/standards/mpeg-7/mpeg-7.htm [5] Getty Institute: A Crosswalk of Metadata Element Sets for Art, Architecture, and Cultural Heritage Information and Online Resources, 2000. ACIS Poster in PDF
Literature
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