Mining Authoritativeness in Art Historical Photo Archives

Book excerpt: In the course of their research, art historians frequently need to refer to historical photo archives when attempting to authenticate works of art. This book, Mining Authoritativeness in Art Historical Photo Archives, provides an aid to retrieving relevant sources and assessing the textual authoritativeness – the internal grounds – of sources of attribution, and to evaluating the authoritativeness of cited scholars. The book aims to do three things: facilitate knowledge discovery in art historical photo archives, support users’ decision-making processes when evaluating contradictory attributions, and provide policies to improve the quality of information in art historical photo archives. The author’s approach is to leverage Semantic Web technologies in order to aggregate, assess, and recommend the most documented authorship attributions. At the same time, the retrieval process allows the providers of art historical data to define a low-cost data integration process with which to update and enrich their collection data. This conceptual framework for assessing questionable information will also be of value to those working in a number of other fields, such as archives, museums, and libraries, as well as to art historians.