Harnessing the Power of Artificial Intelligence for Modelling and Understanding Cultural Heritage Data

Abstract

This chapter combines traditional artificial intelligence (AI) concepts, i.e., computational ontologies, with more recent trends, i.e., deep learning for content-based semantic retrieval in Cultural Heritage. More specifically, the proposed AI-empowered system employs computational ontologies for modelling photographs of religious historical buildings. The ontology, besides supporting data-modelling and concept-level annotation, guides a learning process – implemented through Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) – for automated image categorization and retrieval. The whole system has been tested on the ruins of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Misterbianco, Catania, Italy, showing satisfactory performance.