Intangible Heritage Management and Multimodal Navigation

This chapter presents tools and methods which have been developed in order to manage and consult multimedia ethnographic archives for texts, images, audios (both music and speech), and videos. The system offers the user several retrieval strategies for querying the multimedia archive database by exploiting alphanumeric relational query, audio similarity query, clustering, and image and video similarity. Once a subset of information meeting the user's needs has been identified, this can be displayed in a 3D virtual exhibition which can be visited interactively. The system presented is actually exploited to manage and multimodally navigate the Archive of Ethnography and Social History of the Italian Lombardy Region with some 18,000 oral documents, 3,000 textual transcriptions, 2,000 musical transcriptions, 5,000 MP3 audio files, 10,000 photos, and 500 videos.