Computer Image Information Retrieval System

Computer Image Information Retrieval System:
towards the Unified Iconographic Description
for Museum Object.

K.A. Meerov,
State Historical Museum, Moscow
Phone: 924-55-42
Å-mail: shm@shm.ru

E.S. Kuzmina
State Historical Museum, Moscow
Phone: 924-55-42
Å-mail: lask@shm.ru

The Computer Image Information Retrieval System (CIIRS) is an unusual occurrence. Up to the present judging by Russian Internet sites only Petersburg Hermitage and State Historical Museum (SHM) have it.

In 2000 the SHM opened an exhibition “The Calendar of Russian History”. The unique information related as a rule with the most interesting museum objects is concentrated in the Computer Imaging Department of the SHM. For these objects a digital image-text database is forming. A model of CIIRS is one of problems that can be worked out with such data. We hope this model will be used in SHM’ multimedia reference room. It will give the opportunity to visitors to make themselves familiar with many sorts of museum objects.

The CIIRS imposes the great importance on standardisation of museum object iconographic description. The “Iconographic thesaurus” by F. Garnier (its preliminary russian version) answers the purpose of iconographic standard description. The thesaurus makes it possible for a person analysing the iconography of the object to encode the main information and for a database user (it does not matter what problem he is solving) – to receive a necessary and right answer.

Iconographic description can be determined by two aims:

to study works of art’s peculiarities,

to read rightly and understand the iconographic content.

The first problem is an aim of history of art and of art-criticism, the second one is a distinctive feature of iconographic CIIRS. To explain iconographic content (and not to study peculiarities of the object) it’s a subject of iconographic analyse realising with thesaurus. The aim of iconographic thesaurus is to make easy the access to computer image of museum object. Iconographic analyse keywords help to find a computer image but they do not exhaust the entire iconographic content.

The importance of iconographic analyse is particularly obvious for those museum objects that are not attributed by main information categories such as: creator, dating etc.

Meerov Cyrill, chief of the Computer Imaging Department.

Kuzmina Elena, linguist of the Computer Imaging Department.