Archiving mural paintings using an ontology based approach

In this paper, we propose an archiving scheme for heritage mural paintings. The mural paintings typically depict stories from folk-lore, mythology and history. These narratives provide content-based correlations between different pieces of art. Our e-heritage scheme for archiving the mural paintings is based on an ontology which captures the background knowledge of these narratives. Media features and patterns derived from the mural content are used to enrich the ontology with multimedia data. We have used the multimedia web ontology language as our ontology representation scheme, as it allows perceptual modelling of domain concepts in terms of their media properties, as well as reasoning with uncertainties. Besides the mural content and its knowledge, the ontology also helps encode other aspects of the mural paintings like their painting style, color, physical location, time-period, etc., which are important parameters of their preservation. We propose a framework to provide cross-modal semantic linkage between semantically annotated content of a repository of Indian mural paintings, and a collection of labelled text documents of their narratives. This framework, based on a multimedia ontology of the domain, helps preserve the cultural heritage encoded in these artefacts.