KIRA: A System for Knowledge-Based Access to Multimedia Art Collections

One of the most important research area that during the last decade has taken advantage by the multimedia technologies is certainly the Cultural Heritage Information Management. In this paper, we present KIRA (Knowledge-based Information Retrieval from Art collections), a system to query, browse and analyze cultural digital contents from a set of distributed and heterogeneous multimedia repositories. KIRA provides all the necessary retrieval and presentation functionalities to search information of interest and present it to the users in a suitable format and according to their needs. By means of a set of ad-hoc APIs, our system can also support several applications: mobile multimedia guides for cultural environments, web portals to promote the cultural heritage of a given organization, multimedia recommender and storytelling systems and so on. We describe the main ideas that support the system, showing its use for several applications.