Intangible heritage management and multimodal navigation

In this paper we present the tools and the methods which have been developed in order to manage and consult multimedia ethnographical archives, the content of which is composed of text, images, audios (both songs and spoken documents) and videos. The system offers the user several retrieval strategies for querying the multimedia archive database exploiting alphanumeric relational query, audio similarity query and clustering, image and video similarity. Once a subset of materials meeting the user's information needs have been identified, these images can be displayed in a 3D virtual exhibition which the user can visit interactively. The system presented is actually exploited to manage and multimodal navigate the Archive of Ethnography and Social History of the Lombardy Region some 18,000 oral documents, 3,000 textual transcriptions, 2,000 musical transcriptions, 18,000 MP3 audio files, 10,000 photos, 500 videos.