Online Database of Projects on Archaeological Sites: the Pompeii Project Based on Its “Fortuna Visiva” Project

Benedetto Benedetti, Maria Emilia Masci
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Италия)

Abstract

The Fortuna visiva of Pompeii project aims at presenting the archaeological complex through a digital Archive of visual & written documents from its discovery in 1748 to the end of the Nineteenth century. It proposes an enriched perspective through the reconstruction of various representations of Pompeii in the past, defining a wider critical approach to its cultural identity today.

An information system of interrelated databases has been designed in order to analyse and compare each single source through the access to the original documents, texts and images, aiming at allowing a non-subjective approach to the digital Archive.

The Fortuna visiva of Pompeii is conceived and carried out as work-in-progress: The contents of the Archive and of the Digital Library can be implemented on line in real time from everywhere by the allowed users, as the website (http://pompeii.sns.it) has been designed to be dynamic and interactive. In the Archive section, one can access the Iconographic, Bibliographic and Unedited Sources through three different indexes, two search modalities, predefined and free itineraries and through a topographical approach with a geo-referenced repository of information supported by the existing GIS of Pompeii. All the publications and unedited documents in the Archive can be consulted in their integral form in the Digital Library section.

Preface: the ‘Fortuna Visiva of Pompeii’ within the BRICKS European Project

The project ‘The Fortuna visiva of Pompeii. An Archive of texts and images from the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries’, which originated in April 2002, was planned by the Consorzio FORMA and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (SNS) on the basis of the numerous studies already carried out by different research groups within these institutions, aimed at doing analytical research, at creating a categorizing system, and at managing information on archaeological, architectural and monumental areas, on objects and collections related to Cultural Heritage, in order to make it accessible to the general public.

The project presented in this occasion was selected among others promoted by the Consorzio FORMA to be implemented within the pilot cases of the BRICKS European Project.

The BRICKS Project (Building Resources for Integrated Cultural Knowledge Services) is an Integrated Project of 24 partners (academic-scientific institutions, museums and libraries, public and private entities) supported by the Sixth Framework Programme Priority IST. It started on January 2004, for the duration of 36 months.

The BRICKS project aims at establishing the organisational and technological foundations of a Digital Library directed at forming a European Digital Memory. It will provide an integrated peer-to-peer system that will offer functionality for new generations of Digital Libraries, a comprehensive term covering ‘Digital Museums’, ‘Digital Archives’, and other kinds of digital memory systems. The results of the Project will constitute the main assets of a Factory, which has been subsidised by the Consortium partners and the European Union for the duration of the Project, and will sustain itself in the future. The mission of the BRICKS Factory is the definition, development and maintenance of a user-oriented and service-oriented space, to share knowledge and resources in the Cultural Heritage domain.

Therefore, BRICKS will work in order to advance the status of art in Digital Libraries, using a service-oriented approach which focuses the attention on the user needs, in contrast to the traditional content-oriented approach. The system will work on a distributed open infrastructure, in order to maximise the re-use of existing contents and to reduce maintenance costs by eliminating the need for a centralised infrastructure. The principal objective is to develop an advanced infrastructure able to integrate resources and services for cultural users, including and distributing many European cultural objects and contents from different countries.

The BRICKS information system will be based on open standards; it will adopt an open source software development approach and will involve an open community to enlarge and enforce its resources and input from researchers, scientists, art professionals, and users.

The project will define a set of services to test and validate the infrastructure and to understand and put into practice the user needs and requirements. For managing such a complex and ambitious set of services, the BRICKS proposal and work-plan defines a suitable set of user scenarios and pilot examples. The main goal is to create a set of services that can be the basis of the future advancement of the BRICKS factory and be an attractive lighthouse for the creation of a future cultural heritage community.

The examples chosen (among them there is a selected range of pilot cases as models of best practices) will be a relevant and well-balanced distribution between different user types and different methods of working in a digital content context.

The ‘Fortuna visiva of Pompeii’ project is one of the pilot cases selected from the various products that have been offered by the partners of the BRICKS project. This pilot case will offer a service-oriented scenario regarding the possibility to share knowledge and information about complex cultural heritage objects, specifically for a large archaeological site. The objective is to understand how to use IT tools to gather, compare and distribute information and data. Target users will be researchers of art, history and cultural heritage.

The Digital Archive of the ‘Medici-Lorena Medagliere numismatic collection’ (another running project promoted by Consorzio FORMA, SNS and Soprintendenza Archeologica per la Toscana) will provide a scenario for the digital editions of texts (artistic and historical documents and manuscripts), together with an advancement in the shared creation and access to critical editions in Art, Science and History. Targeted users of this scenario will be the archives’ and libraries’ professional community.

The Consorzio FORMA and the Scuola Normale are involved in the BRICKS project along with other activities: dissemination of the ongoing project’s results; exploitation of the project, with the objective of involving other partners in the BRICK’s community; technical research, in order to develop and design a new and innovative search engine able to retrieve on XML documents.

The ‘Fortuna visiva of Pompeii’ Project

The ‘Fortuna visiva of Pompeii’ project studies the graphic and written documentation on Pompeii, beginning from the years immediately following its discovery, in 1748, and giving priority to the most antique and valuable testimonies, in order to present this documentation through a computerized management system with relative data banks.

The name that was chosen clearly reveals the predominant purpose of the project, which is to analyse the impression that such a monumental and well-known site, in its numerous forms and variations in time and space, has made.

The main objects of research are therefore the figurative representations in themselves (engravings, pictures, watercolours, etc.) and the ‘fortuna’ of the subjects that are reproduced in these, related to the archaeological site and its monuments.

The organisational system designed for the project is based on data that interrelates images and texts. It collects and at the same time, examines in detail individual testimonies, respecting criteria, when possible, void of subjective interpretations, and thus contributing both to the specific research of the analysis of the selected sources and to the conservation, to the arrangement, and to the accessibility of rare documents which possess historical, artistic, and cultural value. The final product is an online archive of visual and written documents from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries.

The ‘Fortuna visiva of Pompeii’ was conceived and carried out by a scientific team from the SNS (http://www.sns.it/) and the Consorzio FORMA (http://forma.sns.it/), directed by Professor Paola Barocchi, supervised by Dr Benedetto Benedetti and coordinated by Dr Maria Emilia Masci.

The Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei (http://www.pompeiisites.org/), thanks to its Superintendent, Professor Pier Giovanni Guzzo,

 works alongside the two institutions in order to promote this project. In particular, the Soprintendenza will provide the GIS of Pompeii, which has been developed by the architects Giovanni Longobardi and Andrea Mandara. The GIS will be added to the actual information system as a geographic platform for the existing digital Archive. The information system and the website have been designed by Liberologico (http://www.liberologico.com), in strict cooperation with the research group. The graphic design of the website was conceived by Giulio Andreini. The Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Rom (http://www.dainst.org/) joined  the scientific staff as an important partner in the project thanks to its Director, Professor Dieter Mertens, and to the Director of its Library, Dr. Thomas Fröhlich. It contributes precious resources of paintings and designs from its Archive as well as antique and rare books from its Library.

The Idea of the ‘Fortuna Visiva’

The idea for the project originated with a research initiated by Professor Paola Barocchi, who was faced with the need to conciliate the information system made up of manifold visual documentation and the expectations of not only scholars, but also of the broad public of visitors and enthusiasts who are fascinated by the largest and best known Italian outdoor museum.

The ‘Fortuna visiva of Pompeii’ intends to analyse the perception of the monumental and archaeological ensemble and the landscape of Pompeii, through the graphic sources and texts produced starting from the years immediately following its discovery, in 1748, until the end of the Nineteenth century. It proposes an enriched perspective through the reconstruction of different representations of Pompeii in the past, defining a wider critical approach to its actual cultural identity.

A methodological approach to the critical knowledge of Pompeii has to consider the result of a sequence of historical perceptions, reconstructed through representations made by artists, writers, ‘experts’, and common visitors from different countries. All these historical visitors have produced a whole range of documents, bearing witness to changes and developments in perceiving and representing Pompeii’s antiquities and landscape, that is, its ‘Fortuna visiva’ as a historical and cultural process.

Such varied perceptions, which on the whole define the cultural identity of Pompeii, break down into a variety of aspects that differ and yet are complementary, determined by the changes in taste over time and by different languages, points of view, and interpretations of the authors that produced documents of various types on the most famous open-air museum in Italy.

The main objective of the research is therefore the examination of the different perceptions and representations of Pompeii, in its several shapes and variations in space and time, in order to obtain an overall view, based on a historical and critical synthesis.

The Contents

The contents of the ‘Fortuna visiva of Pompeii’ project are divided into three main interrelated sections: the Archive, which is the hub of the project, the Digital Library of the edited and unedited documents, and the topographical platform offered by the GIS. These are the three principal interconnected cruxes on which the whole architecture of the project has been based.

The ‘Fortuna visiva of Pompeii’ originated and develops as work-in-progress: its contents are updated in real time from everywhere by the allowed users, so that the corresponding sections of the website (http://pompei.sns.it) are dynamic and evolving.

Archive

The Archive is conceived as a system of interrelated databases. It has been designed in order to examine and compare each single source through the access to the original document, comprehensive of text and images. Thus, it constitutes an easy-to-use critical tool created to provide an in-depth historicized and, as best possible, objective vision of the Pompeii site seen as a monumental and archaeological ensemble and as a historical-environmental reality, reconstructed through its ‘fortuna visiva’. The purpose of such an Archive is to render its contents, which are often rare and not easily accessible, user-friendly.

The Archive brings together a series of database categories which are interrelated and contain various types of information:

• edited and unedited graphic documents which depict not only the archaeological ensemble of Pompeii as a whole, but also the individual monuments, murals, mosaics and architectonic details, objects of cultural interest, etc., are analysed with both a scientific-documentary purpose and an artistic, interpretive and/or imaginative one;
• bibliography of edited and unedited works from which the selected graphic documents are taken;
• biographic information on the people who have taken on the various tasks involved with the production, the elaboration, and eventual publication of the chosen documents: historians, archaeologists, artists, architects, editors, etc..

The complete documentation is comprised of, in substance, three different categories of sources, each corresponding to the three databases built into the system. Our aim is to maintain the most acceptable level of standardization as well as to keep in focus the specific requirements of the project:

• Iconographic Sources: drawings, watercolours, engravings, etc.;
• Bibliographic Sources: edited works from which the Iconographic Sources were taken;
• Unedited Sources: unedited manuscripts and documents connected to the iconographic sources.

All these sources are linkable to the catalogue of the people involved and to the list of the places, both conceived in form of authority files, in order to reduce typing errors, guarantee the precision of the selected entries and allow the creation of controlled dictionaries. Therefore the system includes some management sections for the link to the physical persons involved, including a Biographic database (about authors, editors, artists etc.), and to the Catalogue of the Places, designed as a tree-shaped ontology, which puts the names of the nations, cities and places in a hierarchical order.

The people and the places stored in these authority files are linkable to the records of the Iconographic, Bibliographic and Unedited Sources, through the entering of some pre-defined ‘roles’, that can be selected from some expandable dictionaries: for example, a person can be connected with a bibliographic source through the role of ‘author’; a place can be linked to a bibliographic source by using the role ‘place of publication’.

All three catalogued sources can finally be interrelated by means of pre-established roles and can consequently be joined together as three databases in a single structured Archive: for example, an Iconographic source can be linked to a Bibliographic one, by entering the role ‘in’, to indicate that the catalogued image is contained in a book.

The Archive is therefore conceived as an interrelated catalogue of the iconographic, bibliographic and archival sources on the ‘fortuna visiva’ of Pompeii.

The Archive was designed to take stock of, to arrange, to standardise, and to render accessible to the broad public the documentation that is being studied. It also has the function of being a consultation tool for the analysis and the reconstruction of the ‘fortuna visiva’ of Pompeii and it permits the user to examine individual documents, their connection to one another, and their interpretations.

Given the original assumptions of the project, the Iconographic Sources bear a greater importance than the remaining two, which are targeted at the thorough analysis and the systematisation of the information contained in the graphic documents. As the principal aim of the project consists in the reconstruction of the different perceptions of Pompeii and its monuments, the specific cut chosen for the research determines a strong need to create a subject-oriented database of the Iconographic Sources in the Archive, or rather, to label each visual document with keywords, or key-subjects depending on the type and the specific subject which is being represented. Thus, the database structure of the Iconographic Sources has been enriched with a tree-like, constantly growing Subject Ontology, which permits a useful and easy cataloguing system of the visual documentation on the basis of its type, and of the represented subjects. At the same time, it allows the user to conduct a subject-based query of the contents needed for a specific type of research.

The wide use of authority files, ontologies and controlled dictionaries guarantees the automatic functions of some repetitive actions, the security of the data-entry operations and, at the same time, offers different possibilities for the data retrieval.

The data retrieval in the whole Archive offers a wide range of searching possibilities: the contents can be found through three kinds of indexes, two kinds of research paths, some Predefined or Free Itineraries and a geographic information system (GIS), which will link a map to the data. All the images catalogued in the Iconographic database can also be found by searching one or more lemmas from the Subject Ontology.

Archive: database structure and metadata schema

The Archive of ‘Pompeii’s Fortuna visiva’ joins a number of interrelated databases, in order to organize a vast amount of previously selected and studied material on Pompeii: The database of the Iconographic Sources, the one on the Bibliographic Sources and the one which joins the Unedited Sources.

An appropriate metadata schema, which is based on the consultation of different existing standards and is studied for the specific topics of the project, has been designed ad hoc for the single databases included in Pompeii’s ‘Fortuna visiva’ Archive.

At the moment, it is used for the online data entry system and for the publication on the website, with an appropriate user interface which includes a user-friendly visualization schema.

As these metadata have been designed on the basis of other metadata standards, some crosswalks have been traced with the principal standards, in order to share and join both the metadata and the data of this project to other metadata and data, and to permit operations of metadata extraction, importation or harvesting.

This type of solution has been chosen so that the project could take part in future networks of projects or of peer-to-peer systems, and to maintain at the same time, the metadata structure that is specifically studied for the ‘Fortuna visiva’. In the particular case of the BRICKS European Project, the contents of the ‘Fortuna visiva’ project will be accessible through a metadata extraction based on a crosswalk with the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/).

The field definition table of the iconographic, bibliographic and unedited sources of Pompeii’s ‘Fortuna visiva’ Archive is divided into three different areas:

• Object area: fields in this section contain information about the real object;
• Relation area: fields in this section contain information about the physical persons, the places, the other records and the subjects that are in some relation with the real object;
• Administrative area: fields in this section contain information about legal issues (intellectual property of the record’s content, copyright and property of the real object).

All the information about persons, places, other objects and subjects are recorded in separate authorities, records or ontologies, and then linked to the present record with the use of predefined ‘roles’ (contained in a controlled dictionary).

In the following tables the metadata schema stated for each kind of source is shown, together with the structure of a single record and an example of content to be entered:

Example of a record pertaining to the iconographic sources:

Example of a record pertaining to the BIBLIOgraphic sources:

Example of a record pertaining to the UNEDITED sources:

Example of a record pertaining to the BIOGRAPHIC SOURCES:

Digital Library

The Digital Library brings together the reproductions of the works on Pompeii in form of digital images. The intention is to make precious, rare and generally inaccessible material available to users. In doing so, we not only make consultation easy, but at the same time, we contribute to the ordering, to the preservation and to the conservation of our cultural heritage, which has long been the goal of the projects promoted by the Consorzio FORMA and the SNS.

All the publications and unedited documents in the Archive can be consulted in their integral form within the Digital Library. It is thought to preserve, recover and join together the works from which each catalogued Iconographic source in the Archive originates. There are edited works, which can be found under the heading ‘Bibliographic Sources’ in the Archive (atlases, monographs, articles, treatises, archaeological guides, etc.), and ‘Unedited Sources’ (manuscript volumes, collections of drawings, etc.).

By accessing this section, the user can look up material that gradually builds up during the ongoing growth of the project. This can be done by simply ‘flipping’ through the reproduced volumes, therefore having a direct connection to the document: in this manner the user can read each book and manuscript in its entire form, with their texts and images.

Each folder of the Digital Library, that contains a single book or manuscript, is linked with the corresponding record of the Bibliographic or Unedited Sources in the Archive.

Each file of the Digital Library, corresponding to a record of the Iconographic Sources in the Archive, offers a link to this record.

The link between the Archive and the Digital Library increases the range of information offered to the user, as he can find more information on a graphic document or on a book by consulting it in the Digital Library, than simply looking at the same document in the hard text.

The GIS ‘Un Piano per Pompei’

The existing GIS of Pompeii will be integrated in the project, as a topographical platform that will be linked with the Iconographic Sources of the Archive. The idea is to design a geographic access to the Archive, allowing the users to obtain the information related to each monument of Pompeii, by clicking on its graphic representation on the map.

The GIS ‘Un piano per Pompei’ has been designed by the architects Giovanni Longobardi and Andrea Mandara (Studio di architettura – Rome: http://www.studiar.it/) for the Soprintendenza Archeologica of Pompeii.

It covers about 100 hectares (approximately 1/2 sq. mile), corresponding to the actual extension of Pompeii’s excavations. The GIS contains 3.000 polygons and each polygon is linked to a database with records articulated in 9 classification fields (on the whole, 27.000 data).

The Website

The website of the ‘Fortuna visiva of Pompeii’ project (http://pompei.sns.it) is configured to be a dynamic site: all the contents of the Archive and of the Digital Library continue to expand in real time. The information system allows for immediate publication, as soon as the person responsible validates these contents.

The website includes two types of information: 1) explanations and information about the project and its contents; 2) information that identifies itself in the contents of the Archive, GIS and Digital Library. Thus, those two types of information correspond respectively to the static and dynamic sections of the website.

The static sections of the website entitled ‘Presentation’ and ‘Information’ contain information about the current project, about the organisation of the Archive, of the Digital Library and of the GIS, about the information system and about the project’s scientific and technical teams as well as a list of recommended links.

The contents of the sections ‘News’, ‘Archive consultation’, and ‘Digital library’ are updated in real time, so that these sections are dynamic and evolving. ‘News’ contains up-to-date information and documentation about the ongoing project. In the section ‘Archive consultation’, it is possible to access the Archive of iconographic, bibliographic and unedited sources through different options for the data retrieval:

• Index of sources: is a general index containing all the sources stored in the Archive, put in alphabetical order, which is sorted on the field ‘subject’ (for iconographic sources) or ‘title’ (for bibliographic and unedited sources).
• Index of names: it refers to all sources and contains all the proper names quoted in the Archive. Corresponds to the authority of the people’s names.
• Index of places: it refers to all sources and contains all the place’s names quoted in the Archive. Corresponds to the authority of the places’ names.
• Free search: allows the search of one or more words in all the fields of every source. It is also possible to search more than one word, by connecting them with the use of the Booleans nexus <and>, <or>, and to search root-words.
• Advanced search: allows a specific search for each kind of source and permits to search simultaneously in various fields of a source.
• Free itineraries: allows searching by subject in the iconographic sources, selecting one or more terms from the thesaurus of subjects.
• Predefined itineraries: reserved for non-expert users, are predefined sets of results obtained by the search in the thesaurus of subjects.

The records of the Archive are published in a visualization format that has been specifically studied to be user-friendly. It joins some fields of the data-entry schemas and hides other fields, leaving to the user the possibility of consulting them by clicking on some links. All the records are published in a complete format and in the form of abstracts: the latter is used for showing the results of the queries. The images are published in the website in four low-definition formats (the biggest format is 1000 x 1000 pixels), because of the choice made by the scientific staff to allow the consultation of the contents by a broader public.

The contents of the Archive are accessible also by means of the geographic platform of GIS. Complete publications and unedited sources that make up the material for the Archive may be consulted in the Digital Library and may be cross-referenced.

The Information System

The project’s connotation as a work-in-progress has induced to design an information system able to give the accessibility to the information entered in the content repository in real time, immediately producing the contents that are published in the website.

The software used for the digital Archive is SOURCES web-based, created by Liberologico in strict cooperation with the scientific staff of the ‘Fortuna visiva of Pompeii’ project. This version of the software has been designed with a web-based content management system, developed in ASP. Oracle 9 has been chosen as content repository.

The whole information-system flows together in a dynamic website, in which SOURCES W/B makes available the immediate passing of the information from the data-entry to the repository and from the repository to the final user.

The WEB-based interface permits the administration, cataloguing and consultation of data pertaining to various logical repositories, that are distinct for each kind of operation and data.

The software allows the cataloguing and managing of different kinds of inter-related documents; it permits complex indexing and search-and-browse functions and offers useful checking modalities to guarantee the security of data-entry operations (controlled vocabularies, thesauri and authority files).

The user management system assigns its own rights to each user-category, both for the cataloguing and for the consultation. It is also possible to group users with different rights in some working groups, in order to facilitate the cooperation and the information sharing among the staff pertaining to the different partners for the data-entry operations.

Finally, the information system is based on an open-ended expanding design, which is thought to consent modifications and specific additions that could derive from the ongoing project.

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About authors

Benedetto Benedetti - Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy)
E-mail: b.benedetti@sns.it

Maria Emilia Masci - Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy)

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©  Benedetto Benedetti, Maria Emilia Masci, 2006

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