Design And Construction Of Digital Museum Of Traditional Farm Implements Oriented To Knowledge Services

Traditional farm implements are one importance part of agricultural culture heritage,and the protection and research of farm implements is a part of the protection of agricultural culture heritage and research of agricultural history.Therefore,how preserve farm implements for a long time and attract more people to agricultural culture heritage is a new task that research of farm implements is facing now.As a new mode of managing and utilizing culture heritage in the context of digital ages, digital museum collects,manages and exhibits physical cultural heritage and intangible cultural heritage by a digital form,and provides services such as digital exhibition, education and research to users by internet.Digital museum breaks down the space-time restriction,and becomes museum without wall,which makes everyone can obtain information about cultural heritage momentarily and everywhere.After investigating the preservation situation of traditional farm implements,this paper indicated that applying the theories and technologies of digital museum to the preservation and research of traditional farm implements is very important and necessary.Then this paper saved information of traditional farm implements and related resources in a digitized form,initially constructed the digital museum of tradiotnal farm implements oriented to knowledge services(hereinafter referred as DMTFI).The museum is a information commons of traditional farm implements that makes users can break down space-time restriction to browse and retrieve collections and related resource by network,and constructs a new platform for research on farm implements.The construction of digital museum makes use of knowledge and technologies of several subjects such as computer science,museology and information science.The main content of this paper can abstracted as following:(1) Research on the construction pattern of DMTFI.After investigation on several construction patterns of digital museum,this paper select virtual museum as the construction pattern of DMTFI on account of the particularity of traditional farm implements.The museum is a digital museum only existents in the imaginary space of network and dose not have apparent relation with reality.The museum is designed as an information commons that provides knowledge services to fulfill the functions of education and research.(2) Digitized collection of information of traditional farm implements and design of metadata scheme for traditional farm implements.Acquisition and organization of collections data is the primary task when constructing a digital museum.This paper selected the traditional farm implement images in TRADITIONAL FARM IMPLEMENTS COLLECTED BY THE AGRICULTURAL MUSEUM OF CHINA and IMAGE SET OF CHINESE FARM IMPLEMENTS,objects collected by The Chinese Agricultural Culture Museum,Luzhi Farm Implement Museum and Suoga Ecological Museum as resources of collections, accomplished data acquisition of about 2100 traditional farm implement collections in a mean which combined direct digitization and indirect digitization.For the sake of more exactly describing collection information,we used some famous metadata standards as reference such as Dublin Core Metadata Element Set,Categories for the Description of Works of Art,CIDOC information Categories etc.,drew the metadata schema for traditional farm implements,which composes of 4 core elements,17 core elements for museum collections,2 elements for farm implement collections and 82 refinements of elements.(3) Construction of the knowledge base of traditional farm implements(hereinafter referred as KBTFI).With the aim of taking convenience to researchers of traditional farm implements on information retrieval,this paper constructed KBTFI which composed of following parts:①the concept database of farm implements,②the chapter database of ancient agricultural books,③the image database of farm implements,④the database of paint works with the theme of agricultural production,⑤the full-text database of thesis research on farm implements.The knowledge base is a knowledge management system which regards experienced experts in traditional farm implements domain,paper documents and network resources as the sources,knowledge as saving and processing object.The main content of the construction of the knowledge base included the framework design,the knowledge resources choosing,acquisition and save of knowledge cell.(4) Construction of classification of traditional farm implement and the indexing and retrieval thesaurus of DMTFI.On the basis of comparison and analyse of exiting traditional farm implement classification systems,the farm implement classification system applicable to DMTFI was designed.The classification overcomes the confusion begot by the different classification standards applied by different collection sources,and effectively promotes the veracity and consistency when classifying farm implements.For the purpose of improving retrieval efficiency,we constructed the indexing and retrieval thesaurus of DMTFI on the basis of collection of concepts related traditional farm implements and recognition of semantic relationships among concepts.The thesaurus is regarded as the sources of information of relevant areas of collection database and KBTFI to fulfill concept search. The thesaurus composes of 506 preferred terms and 257 non-preferred terms.This paper accomplished the visualization of the thesaurus by dint of the function of graphic display of Protégé,displayed the thesaurus to users in the ways of traditional dendriform display as well as graphic display.(5) Construction of question answering system for traditional farm implement domain. This paper developed question answering system for traditional farm implement domain to act a role of virtual expositor.Construction of the question answering system comprised the collection of FAQ,automated Chinese word segmentation,Chinese question sentence classification,and sentence similarity computing bases on VSM,and so on.(6) Research on knowledge services in DMTFI.This paper applied KBTFI to DMFI, provided users one stop retrieval to traditional farm implement collections and related resources;integrated the question answering system for traditional farm implement domain and DMTFI to answer users' questions related to traditional farm implements;provided collection information with different detailed grade to users with different needs;offered My Museum services to users to set up personalized collections and folders;provided personalized information customization and information pushing to users.Through the above efforts,we put up significative exploration and practice on the application of knowledge services to digital museum.This paper applies the theories and technologies to the preservation and research of traditional farm implements,and organizes and manages the collection data and related resources with the methods of library and information science,its creativities are summarized as following:First,the construction of DMFI fulfills digital preservation of traditional farm implement collections and related information,provides full and accurate reference for the research of farm implements,and constructs a new platform for the research and communication of researchers on traditional farm implements.Secondly,the construction of KBTFI and the question answering system for traditional farm implement domain and applying them to DMTFI and the offer of personalized information services upgrade the services of DMTFI to knowledge services,show a new perspective on research and construction of digital museums.Certainly,the construction of digital museum is a system process.For the reasons of time and person,we only took a pilot study on the design and construction of digital museum, and DMTFI is only a experimental system which is so faulty that there is a gap between DMTFI and a perfect system.There is many further research needed to be took on increasing the sources of collections to expend the scale of collections,enhancing variety and amount of related resources.In addition,this paper applied planar but three-dimensional information gathering and display technologies.Therefore,application of three-dimensional information gathering and display technologies and virtual reality technology,and promoting diversity and interaction of exhibitions are the striving direction of our work.