WikiArt: An Ontology-Based Information Retrieval System for Arts

Abstract

The paper presents WikiArt, a new system integrating three distinct types of contents about the art: data, information, and knowledge, to generate automatically thematic paths to consult all its contents. WikiArt is a wiki, allowing to manage cooperatively documents about artists, artworks, artistic movements or techniques, and so on. It is also an expert system, provided with an ontology about arts, with which it is able to plan possible different ways of consulting and browsing its contents. This ability is made possible by a second part of the ontology of the system, describing a collection of criteria regarding how to plan thematic paths, and by a set of rules followed by the expert system to carry out this task. WikiArt is not a semantic wiki, because the ontology has not been employed to tag semantically the documents by the authors. But only their subjects. Our efforts are now devoted to the extension of the system to make it a semantic wiki too.