Matching Conservation-Restoration Trajectories: An Ontology-Based Approach

The context of our work is a project at the French National Library (BnF), which aims at designing a decision support system for conservation experts. The goal of this system is to analyze the conservation history of documents in order to enable reliable predictions on their physical state. The present work is the first step towards such system. We propose a representation of a document conservation history as a conservation-restoration trajectory, and we specify its different types of events. We also propose a trajectory matching process which computes a similarity score between two conservation-restoration trajectories taking into account the terminological heterogeneity of the events. We introduce an ontological model validated by domain experts which will be used during the pairwise comparison of events in two trajectories. Finally, we present experiments showing the effectiveness of our approach.