Towards Automatic Classification of 3-D Museum Artifacts Using Ontological Concepts

The development and use of content-based retrieval techniques for 3-D models is a relatively new departure in multimedia retrieval. We have extended our existing multimedia museum information system to support content-, metadataand concept-based retrieval of 3D models of museum artifacts and in this paper we describe a “classifier agent” to automatically assign associations between 3-D artifacts and concepts and metadata stored in a domain ontology. The context of the classifier agent is described, together with an overview of its architecture. Selecting appropriate parameters for the agent is an important activity and a comparison is made between manually selected parameters and the results of an automatic technique to determine “optimal” settings.