World Heritage Memory Net
Encyclopedia
World Heritage Memory Net (WHMNet), a partnership project with UNESCO
World Heritage Centre, is a global digital library
of cultural, historical, and heritage multimedia collections related to the current 936 UNESCO World Heritage Site
s. Of these 936 sites, 725 are cultural sites, 183 natural, and 28 mixed and a few are in danger. WHMNet was officially launched April 29, 2011, and can be thought of as “the world’s heritage at your fingertips.”
The guiding conceptual principle for the development of the World Heritage Memory Net is to construct a framework that allows users to easily see, explore, discover, and visually experience the 936 Heritage Sites first, and then dig in for more detailed and descriptive information about each Site, as graphically shown on the home page. It is directed by Dr. Ching-chih Chen
, currently of Global Connection and Collaboration, a nonprofit and tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization; prior to July 2010, Professor Chen directed this project for three years at Simmons College until she became Professor Emeritus.
The goal of WHMNet is to provide an online library of material related to the 936 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and to provide universal access to a worldwide audience. WHMNet provides multimedia and multilingual content and retrieval, videos, timeline, map, as well as links to major resources, such as OCLC, Wikipedia
, Internet Archive
, Million Books, Google Scholar
and Google Books
.
All of the collections are available in at least 6 official UN languages: Arabic, Chinese
, English
, French
, Russian
and Spanish
. As of 2011, up to 103 languages are supported by WHMNet, as available.
of the US nonprofit and tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, Global Connection and Collaboration, Inc., and supported until August 2010 by the NSF/International Digital Library Program (IDLP) as a part of her Global Memory Net
, WHMNet is the result of a multi-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in November 2006 between the World Heritage Centre and Simmons College
, Boston, Massachusetts, USA under the leadership of Dr. Ching-chih Chen, who was then information technology Professor at Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. The WHMNet project, which began in July 2007, benefits greatly from Dr. Chen's GMNet, an online global image library and gateway to cultural, historical, and heritage images around the world, created with a multi-year grant from the International Digital Library Programme of the US National Science Foundation (NSF)
. WHMNet leverages GMNet's innovative integrated multimedia content retrieval system (i-M-C-S) with further system development. Dr. Chen became Professor Emeritus of Simmons College in June, 2010 and NSF grant ended in August 2010. Since September 2010 to the present, WHMNet has been supported by GlobalCC until its completion.
The goal is to bring an immersive, seamless, multimedia experience in a multilingual website to citizens, researchers, scholars and students of the world. The former World Heritage Centre Director and current UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture, Francesco Bandarin, has stated that the project offers "great potential to enhance the humanities for universal access and enrichment through the use of emerging technologies." It exposes the world’s cultural, natural, and mixed wonders as well as educates global citizens to the dangers of losing these properties through war and environmental factors. It also serves to better promote intercultural understanding during this troubled time.
Multilingual multimedia collections of the 936 UNESCO World Heritage Sites are accessible by:
In addition to basic demographic information and descriptions, each site page includes a sliding image gallery of up to 75 images, and a link to the main image gallery of up to 250 images per site. Further bibliographic information and still images (photographs) of each site are available for both traditional and content-based image retrieval, and when videos, audio clips as well as 360° Panophotographies are available, they are also provided.
In addition to WHMNet's own image resources and UNESCO/WHC's images (approximately 5% of the total, used with permission), relevant open source images are identified, selected, and provided. These include those from websites such as Wikimedia Commons
and Flickr
. Video sources from WHC's partner, NHK World Heritage 100 series, are linked, as well as 360° Panophotographies of some sites.
, Million Books, Google Scholar
and Google Books
, Wikipedia
, and Flickr
.
World Heritage Centre
• Tito Dupret and patrimonium-mundi.org for permission to use his 360° Panophotographies.
• Global Memory Net
• Additional content providers for materials relevant to the World Heritage Memory Net can be found in the content development page of World Heritage Memory Net.
• Global Memory Net
(World Heritage Memory Net’s system is modified and expanded from that of GMNet)
• PROJECT EMPEROR-I (1985–1994)
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
World Heritage Centre, is a global digital library
Digital library
A digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats and accessible by computers. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks...
of cultural, historical, and heritage multimedia collections related to the current 936 UNESCO World Heritage Site
World Heritage Site
A UNESCO World Heritage Site is a place that is listed by the UNESCO as of special cultural or physical significance...
s. Of these 936 sites, 725 are cultural sites, 183 natural, and 28 mixed and a few are in danger. WHMNet was officially launched April 29, 2011, and can be thought of as “the world’s heritage at your fingertips.”
The guiding conceptual principle for the development of the World Heritage Memory Net is to construct a framework that allows users to easily see, explore, discover, and visually experience the 936 Heritage Sites first, and then dig in for more detailed and descriptive information about each Site, as graphically shown on the home page. It is directed by Dr. Ching-chih Chen
Ching-chih Chen
Ching-chih Chen is an educator, administrator, consultant, and speaker in the field of Digital Information Management and Technology. After her 10-year administrative experience, and 39-year teaching, research, consulting and speaking activities, she became Professor Emeritus of Simmons College in...
, currently of Global Connection and Collaboration, a nonprofit and tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization; prior to July 2010, Professor Chen directed this project for three years at Simmons College until she became Professor Emeritus.
The goal of WHMNet is to provide an online library of material related to the 936 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and to provide universal access to a worldwide audience. WHMNet provides multimedia and multilingual content and retrieval, videos, timeline, map, as well as links to major resources, such as OCLC, Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
, Internet Archive
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
, Million Books, Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of Europe and America's largest...
and Google Books
Google Book Search
Google Books is a service from Google that searches the full text of books that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database. The service was formerly known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October...
.
All of the collections are available in at least 6 official UN languages: Arabic, Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
, English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
and Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
. As of 2011, up to 103 languages are supported by WHMNet, as available.
History
Directed by Dr. Ching-chih ChenChing-chih Chen
Ching-chih Chen is an educator, administrator, consultant, and speaker in the field of Digital Information Management and Technology. After her 10-year administrative experience, and 39-year teaching, research, consulting and speaking activities, she became Professor Emeritus of Simmons College in...
of the US nonprofit and tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, Global Connection and Collaboration, Inc., and supported until August 2010 by the NSF/International Digital Library Program (IDLP) as a part of her Global Memory Net
Global Memory Net
Global Memory Net is a world digital library of cultural, historical, and heritage image collections. It is directed by http://memorynet.org/director/ Prof. Ching-chih Chen], Professor Emeritus of , Boston, Massachusetts and supported by the /International Digital Library Program...
, WHMNet is the result of a multi-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in November 2006 between the World Heritage Centre and Simmons College
Simmons College (Massachusetts)
Simmons College, established in 1899, is a private women's undergraduate college and private co-educational graduate school in Boston, Massachusetts.-History:Simmons was founded in 1899 with a bequest by John Simmons a wealthy clothing manufacturer in Boston...
, Boston, Massachusetts, USA under the leadership of Dr. Ching-chih Chen, who was then information technology Professor at Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. The WHMNet project, which began in July 2007, benefits greatly from Dr. Chen's GMNet, an online global image library and gateway to cultural, historical, and heritage images around the world, created with a multi-year grant from the International Digital Library Programme of the US National Science Foundation (NSF)
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
. WHMNet leverages GMNet's innovative integrated multimedia content retrieval system (i-M-C-S) with further system development. Dr. Chen became Professor Emeritus of Simmons College in June, 2010 and NSF grant ended in August 2010. Since September 2010 to the present, WHMNet has been supported by GlobalCC until its completion.
The goal is to bring an immersive, seamless, multimedia experience in a multilingual website to citizens, researchers, scholars and students of the world. The former World Heritage Centre Director and current UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture, Francesco Bandarin, has stated that the project offers "great potential to enhance the humanities for universal access and enrichment through the use of emerging technologies." It exposes the world’s cultural, natural, and mixed wonders as well as educates global citizens to the dangers of losing these properties through war and environmental factors. It also serves to better promote intercultural understanding during this troubled time.
Collections
WHMNet is a fast, efficient, cutting-edge, online knowledge base which provides universal access to multilingual, multimedia and multiformat resources from museums, archives, libraries, and world bibliographic and Web resources, and includes photographs, videos, 360° Panophotographies, audio clips, and documents. Currently the WHMNet Collection has more than 40,000 images, 27 video tours, many more video documentaries from available sources, and access to more than 250 360° Panophotographies courtesy of Tito Dupret of patrimonium-mundi.org. Detailed descriptive information is presented in multilingual format in at least 6 UNESCO official languages (Arabic Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish) and in many additional languages when available. In total, 103 world languages are represented.Multilingual multimedia collections of the 936 UNESCO World Heritage Sites are accessible by:
- Geographical regions - such as Africa, Asia, Europe, etc.
- Within each region by country or areas
- Within each country or area, alphabetically by the name of the World Heritage Site
- Alphabetically by World Heritage Site category: Cultural, Natural, Mixed, In Danger
- Timeline, listing type of site, name of site, and a popup with information, an image, and a link to the main page for that World Heritage Site
In addition to basic demographic information and descriptions, each site page includes a sliding image gallery of up to 75 images, and a link to the main image gallery of up to 250 images per site. Further bibliographic information and still images (photographs) of each site are available for both traditional and content-based image retrieval, and when videos, audio clips as well as 360° Panophotographies are available, they are also provided.
In addition to WHMNet's own image resources and UNESCO/WHC's images (approximately 5% of the total, used with permission), relevant open source images are identified, selected, and provided. These include those from websites such as Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons is an online repository of free-use images, sound and other media files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation....
and Flickr
Flickr
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
. Video sources from WHC's partner, NHK World Heritage 100 series, are linked, as well as 360° Panophotographies of some sites.
System and Usage
Under Prof. Chen's conceptual guidance and new web interface design and development, World Heritage Memory Net (WHMNet) continues to use the in-house LINUX/MySQL/PHP-based i-M-C-S which was developed with substantial contributions from international visiting researchers for Global Memory Net (GMNet). To accommodate WHMNet’s needs, much modification and enhancement of the i-M-C-S system was made, and some new features were added. The system for both WHMNet and GMNet was developed at Simmons College under the sponsorship of the US National Science Foundation between 2001 and August 2010. Since September 2010 until the completion of this project, the system development and modification has been supported by Global Connection and Collaboration. This system allows users to perform searches using a variety of search methods in addition to commonly known traditional methods.Search Methods
- Search Terms: Each page includes an open search box for traditional search by search field (such as title, date, location, keyword, source, etc.), in multiple languages. Advanced Search with additional Boolean Operators is available for both sites and images by language and by multiple fields.
- Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR): Like its sister project, Global Memory NetGlobal Memory NetGlobal Memory Net is a world digital library of cultural, historical, and heritage image collections. It is directed by http://memorynet.org/director/ Prof. Ching-chih Chen], Professor Emeritus of , Boston, Massachusetts and supported by the /International Digital Library Program...
, WHMNet offers Random and Similar search methods. These methods provide access to a wider audience than traditional metadata retrieval methods like TitleTitleA title is a prefix or suffix added to someone's name to signify either veneration, an official position or a professional or academic qualification. In some languages, titles may even be inserted between a first and last name...
, KeywordKeyword (linguistics)In corpus linguistics a key word is a word which occurs in a text more often than we would expect to occur by chance alone. Key words are calculated by carrying out a statistical test which compares the word frequencies in a text against their expected frequencies derived in a much larger corpus,...
, or Browse, though these are also offered. When a Random search is requested, the computer randomly selects files to display. The user may then choose their search path based on his or her visual or contextual interest. The Similar search function uses CBIR which was developed by James Z. Wang at Pennsylvania State UniversityPennsylvania State UniversityThe Pennsylvania State University, commonly referred to as Penn State or PSU, is a public research university with campuses and facilities throughout the state of Pennsylvania, United States. Founded in 1855, the university has a threefold mission of teaching, research, and public service...
but modified in-house. The Random and Similar search methods allow users to browse the collections without requiring knowledge of the language used to describe the records. Thus, the information in WHMNet is retrieved not only by the previous and existing conventional way of searching by country, region, name of site, etc., but also by enhanced search methods including freely browsing, randomly looking for images of interest, finding similar images, zooming for details, and obtaining appropriate annotations. This enables users to quickly retrieve, view and experience a cross-country, cross-cultural collection of images of similar color and shape, such as cathedrals, palaces, temples, archaeological sites, etc., and to access all information associated with those images.
- Geographical Search: Heritage Sites are accessible through listings by region, countries, and sites, and are additionally accessible through the use of a Google Map widget. Users may scan the map for locations of interest and are directed to the appropriate WHMNet page when a Site is chosen.
- Temporal Search: All historical or cultural Sites (excluding natural locations), are listed on a sliding timeline that ranges from 10,000 B.C. to the current date, and which links to individual site pages. Users can scroll through the centuries viewing all relevant Sites related to the time period of interest.
Linked Data
WHMNet links to outside data sources to provide more additional information resources to the user. These resources include OCLC, Internet ArchiveInternet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
, Million Books, Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of Europe and America's largest...
and Google Books
Google Book Search
Google Books is a service from Google that searches the full text of books that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database. The service was formerly known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October...
, Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
, and Flickr
Flickr
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
.
WHM Lecture Series
WHMNet and GMNet have been widely exposed through numerous invited, keynote and plenary speaking engagements in over a dozen countries. Beginning in January 2011, a specific lecture series has started entitled World Cultural Heritage is One Click Away: Lecture Series. This series of talks has been given in many locations in Taiwan; the National Agricultural Library in Silver Springs, MD; through a Digital Video Conference to the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan; ACRL/IRC Convention in Washington, DC; and many others.Partners and Collaborators
• Partnership with UNESCOUNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
World Heritage Centre
• Tito Dupret and patrimonium-mundi.org for permission to use his 360° Panophotographies.
• Global Memory Net
Global Memory Net
Global Memory Net is a world digital library of cultural, historical, and heritage image collections. It is directed by http://memorynet.org/director/ Prof. Ching-chih Chen], Professor Emeritus of , Boston, Massachusetts and supported by the /International Digital Library Program...
• Additional content providers for materials relevant to the World Heritage Memory Net can be found in the content development page of World Heritage Memory Net.
Related Projects
• National Tsing Hua University Memory Net (Launched on April 23, 2011, NTHU Memory Net was developed jointly by NTHU and Global Connection and Collaboration to create an online multimedia and multilingual knowledge base celebrating Tsing Hua’s Centennial Anniversary. NTHU Memory Net is based on the same conceptual framework and uses the i-M-C-S system which was developed for GMNet, and enhanced for WHMNet.• Global Memory Net
Global Memory Net
Global Memory Net is a world digital library of cultural, historical, and heritage image collections. It is directed by http://memorynet.org/director/ Prof. Ching-chih Chen], Professor Emeritus of , Boston, Massachusetts and supported by the /International Digital Library Program...
(World Heritage Memory Net’s system is modified and expanded from that of GMNet)
• PROJECT EMPEROR-I (1985–1994)