Reim Doumat

Digitized ancient documents… What's next?

Les collections numeriques de documents de l’heritage culturel sont la plupart du temps des images scannees. Actuellement ces documents sont disponibles sur internet, mais ont besoin d’annotations manuelles qui expliquent leur contenu afin de les rendre accessibles et exploitables. L’annotation manuelle est couteuse et fastidieuse, mais le travail collaboratif peut l’accelerer. Ce travail collaboratif facilite la tâche d’annotation et mutualise l’experience de chacun. Dans cet article, nous proposons un systeme qui trace les actions des utilisateurs pendant leur travail sur des documents et fournit une assistance basee sur ces traces. Nous presentons egalement un modele d’archive numerique et un prototype pour l’annotation de documents numeriques en ligne. Cette application permet aux utilisateurs de travailler en collaboration et de profiter d’un systeme d’assistance base sur les traces d’utilisation.DOI:10.3166/DN.12.1.31-51

A web 2.0 archive to access, annotate and retrieve manuscripts

The Web development encouraged different organizations and individuals to expose their multimedia documents on the internet. Additionally, the migration to web 2.0 offered users the chance to comment and annotate the contents of these multimedia documents. Museums and libraries are particularly interested in users’ feedback and work, because many collections, such as handwritten manuscripts, are still puzzles for archivists. Therefore any feedback concerning these contents will be welcomed. This article focuses on the design and the implementation of a web archive. The main objective is enabling users to annotate easily and remotely manuscript documents using web 2.0 application. User annotations are considered important to enrich the archive contents with essential information nevertheless not all users are experts in the manuscript domain. Accordingly, users need a kind of assistance during the search and annotation processes. The proposed assistant in our archive is a recommender system; it relies on registered traces of the user interaction with the documents to generate suggestions.

Case-Based Reasoning to Support Annotating Manuscripts in Digital Archives

The process of manually annotating ancient manuscripts may rise a problem of verifying each user annotations. Thus, it is important to use a supporting system to correct certain annotations; this may be done on the basis of the experience of other users in similar cases. In this chapter, we present how we used case-based reasoning (CBR) in a digital archive to make a recommender system, which will accelerate the annotation process and correct user errors. In fact, our system tracks important user actions and saves those actions as traces. The CBR is applied to users’ traces that are considered as users’ experiences. Traces are structured in reusable sections called episodes (cases); each episode represents the work done on one document unit. Episode actions comprise both problems and solutions. The recommender system compares the current episode of the annotator trace with the traces database to find similar episodes, and recommends the most appropriate actions representing the solution to the user. At that point, the user takes the responsibility of accepting or refusing the recommendations. A prototype of this application has been developed to test the performance of using the CBR system in a digital archive. The experimental results confirmed the efficiency of using case-based reasoning in this domain.