Speaker: Dr. Vincenzo Lombardo (University of Torino) 

Title: Interoperable database and virtual reality for archaeological investigations and storytelling 

Abstract: Archaeological projects require a great amount of work in the representation and storage of digital data about the excavation of the archaeological site, the information about the encountered findings, and the analyses carried out by the laboratories and the consequent interpretations of the facts. Archaeological databases need a careful design for the description of object metadata, after the realization of a conceptual map that identifies the main entities and relationships of the relevant scientific knowledge. 

However, though archaeological databases are of primary importance for retracing the interpretation processes and identifying the supporting elements, they often remain a pure archive, with no more accesses after the excavation activities; often, disciplinary experts work in isolation, and usually relying on scientific literature that rarely includes a friendly access to the datasets. The dissemination of results must rely on the database to exploit the body of knowledge encoded in the database. A well-known presentation setting in archaeology is to exhibit results through virtual reality. Virtual reality yields the recreation of the remote site in a geospatial layout as well as the reproduction the diachronic phases of the excavation and the encounter of findings.

This seminar presents an approach for virtual archaeology that relies on an interoperable database and virtual reality techniques to exhibit the results. The application traverses multi-cultural dimensions (Japan-Europe) and multi-targeted audiences (general audiences and multi-disciplinary scholars). 

Short Bio: Vincenzo Lombardo is a Full Professor of Informatics, at the University of Turin, Department of Informatics, Italy. He is the President of CIRMA (Centre for Research on Multimedia and Audiovisuals – www.cirma.unito.it) and Senior Research Associate to Institute of Geosciences and Georesources of National Research Council (CNR-IGG). His research concerns methodologies, models and applications of informatics, and artificial intelligence in particular, for interdisciplinary challenges, such as multimedia design and interactive storytelling, knowledge encoding and semantic tagging for several domains (e.g., earth science, drama, archaeology), natural language processing and cognitive modeling.

Organizer: Maritime Asia Heritage Survey (MAHS)