Multimedia and geographic data integration for cultural heritage information retrieval.

In this paper a system providing an efficient integration between Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) is presented. Over the years, many CBIR systems have been proposed to give a solution for an efficient use of multimedia/visual contents and other issues as performance, quality of retrieval, data heterogeneity, and multimodal information integration. The aim of the proposed approach is to prove that the use of geographic data can improve the results obtained by an image matching system based only on visual data. Our framework is composed of three parts, each of them described in detail in this paper: the first part is dedicated to CBIR, with an experimental comparison of a large number of different multimedia features to choose the one to use in the system implementation; in the second part the methodology to integrate geographic and multimedia data is showed; in the last part is presented a GIR system implementation using a “points of interest” search. An Android application has been developed for the client-side using Apache Solr as server side provider for the information retrieval functionalities. An experimental evaluation is carried out to demonstrate the effective improvement given by the combination of geographic and multimedia data. Our results have been obtained using a real dataset composed of artworks located in Naples’s museums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]