Using sharable ontology to retrieve historical images

Abstract

We present a framework of utilizing sharable domain ontology and thesaurus to help the retrieval of historical images of the First Emperor of China's terracotta warriors and horses. Incorporating the sharable domain ontology in RDF and RDF schemas of semantic web and a thesaurus, we implement methods to allow easily annotating images into RDF instances and parsing natural language like queries into the query schema in XML format. We also implement a partial structural matching algorithm to match the query schema with images at the level of semantic schemas. Therefore the historical images can be retrieved by naïve users of domain specific history in terms of natural language like queries.