A metadata enriched system for the documentation of multi-modal digital imaging surveys

Abstract

In the field of Digital Heritage studies, data provenance has always been an open and challenging issue. As Cultural Heritage (CH) objects are unique by definition, the methods, practices and strategies to build digital documentation are not homogeneous, universal or standardized. Metadata is a minimalistic yet powerful form to source and describe a digital document. It is often required or mandatory at an advanced stage of a Digital Heritage project. Our approach is to document a Digital Heritage asset by integrating meaningful data from multiple sources and multimodal imaging surveys. This article exposes the methodological and technical aspects related to the ongoing development of MEMoS – which stands for Metadata Enriched Multimodal documentation System. MEMoS aims to contribute to data provenance issues in current multimodal imaging surveys. It explores a way to document CH oriented capture data sets with a versatile descriptive metadata scheme inspired from the W7 ontological model. In addition, an experiment illustrated by several case studies explores the possibility of integrating this metadata encoded into 2D barcodes directly to the captured image set. The article lays the foundation of a three-part methodology to describe, encode and display metadata-enriched documentation of CH objects.