Francesco Mele

The contribution of AI to enhance understanding of Cultural Heritage

The Artificial Intelligence & Cultural Heritage (AI & CH) working group was born in 1999 with the aim at promoting various scientific activities to increase a more active collaboration between the sectors of cultural assets and artificial intelligence. The many events (workshops and schools) organized over the years have shown the validity of this group for exchanging ideas and gathering researchers and practitioners from different fields. New applications of informatics and artificial intelligence have provided the opportunity to produce innovative tools for documenting, managing and communicating cultural heritage. For this anniversary we intend to show how some of the most important methods and techniques of artificial intelligence developed in this area, still represent significant tools for preservation, archiving and fruition of cultural heritage. In the following the contributions of Italian researchers involved for several years in projects related to cultural heritage, will be presented.

OntoTimeFL – A Formalism for Temporal Annotation and Reasoning for Natural Language Text

This work has been developed with the motivation of defining a formalism (OntoTimeFL) for annotating complex events in natural language texts and applying, to the items annotated, several types of axioms and rules for temporal reasoning. In part, OntoTimeFL is a conceptualization of TimeML formalism, where the basic concepts of annotation by an ontological form have been represented. TimeML entities have been analyzed to extract the concepts hidden in the formalism and such concepts have been defined as classes of a formal ontology. In addition, OntoTimeFL introduces new constructs (concepts) for the annotation that mainly concern three complex events: narrative, intentional, and causal. The definition of OntoTimeFL through a formal ontology is a methodological choice made in order to facilitate the automatic annotation processes, to reuse the existing axiomatics in the research of temporal reasoning, and to facilitate the creation of new ones (in particular an application of causal reasoning will be shown).

Towards a formal approach to generative design: an assistant system for the creation of artefact models

In this paper we propose a formal approach to the generative design of artefacts. The founding idea, bridging the gap between the domain of architectural artefacts and the field of ontologies, is to represent the notion of species as it exists in the context of generative design by the concept of class existing in the field of formal ontologies. In this paper we propose an artefact design methodology and a system based on it that assists a designer in the building process of artefact 3D models. The implemented system is structured in three conceptual levels: the Design Strategy, the Computational Model, and the 3D graphical rendering system. The Computational model has been defined and developed using the Frame Logic formalism. The proposed methodology is independent of specific modelling environments. In this paper we also present methodological directions to couple artefact representations with 3D rendering systems.