University of Maryland, College Park

The University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and College of Information Studies will partner with the Indianapolis Museum of Art and 12 other museums to conduct research on new methods to improve user access to online museum images. This project will design and test a multi-institution image database containing search terms derived from several sources, including texts associated with exhibition catalogs, and terms contributed by online viewers, a technique known as “social tagging.” The project will build on two previous projects, including the IMLS-funded “Steve” project, which created a database of user-contributed tags and investigated methods of labeling and categorizing these terms to make objects easier for the public to find. The new project will combine these data sources and apply automated computational linguistics techniques to identify and filter terms to allow users to expand or narrow their queries through the application of disambiguation techniques of text-mined terms and tags.