Within the Mingei project, we collect the narratives of individual craftsmen and -women describing how they work. Besides those narratives, it is important to collect general descriptions of the craft processes that are used in each of our three pilots on glass, mastic and silk weaving. This is important because they complement the individual, particular knowledge and experience of craftspeople. How do we create these general descriptions?

From crafts to process scheme

Processes are a central notion in computer science, therefore there are many languages that have been developed to describe processes and to manage their execution in computer science. These languages typically address computational processes, that is, actions and events that occur inside a computer to accomplish tasks – such as processing an order in an online shop.

On the other hand, crafts are performed by humans and characterized by unforeseen events or situations, and each crafter has its own way of dealing with it. There are formal languages for detailing behavior up to any level of detail. These languages are mainly in robotics. However, these languages are not needed for Mingei. The purpose of Mingei is not to instruct a robot to be a crafter, but rather to transmit crafting knowledge to humans.

In order to transfer the crafting knowledge onto – for example – museum visitors, it suffices to use a language that allows us to outline the general steps of the process. Based on these outlines, we then tackle the difficulties and peculiarities of the crafting process by linking to additional information. This can be videos showing how a master does it, texts describing the step in natural language, images of the tools, and so on.

The activity diagram of mastic

Following a consolidated practice, we have adopted a de facto standard, namely Activity Diagrams of the Unified Modelling Language, also known as UML. The following picture shows the activity diagram that describes the cultivation of mastic, which is one of Mingei’s pilot crafts.

The diagram has three vertical “swim lanes” in different colors: each swim lane corresponds to a kind of plant and shows the activities that concern that kind. On the left side of the diagram, the time periods illustrate when the different phases of mastic cultivation take place.

The diagram has a beginning node (the circle on top) but no ending node, since the cultivation of mastic is a cyclic activity that repeats the same every year and, at least in principle, never ends.

During January and the first half of February, cultivators are busy planting new plants, irrigating young plants and irrigating, pruning and fertilizing adult plants. All these activities are performed in parallel, as the diagram shows by enclosing them between horizontal synchronization bars.

No other activity is carried out on new and young plant for the rest of the year. In contrast, adult plants require a lot of attention from March to mid-October:

• Plowing, in March and April
• Cleaning soil, in June
• Embroidering, in July
• Embroidering and collecting, in August
• Collecting in September until mid-October

The diagram has a graphical notation, which allows humans to understand the process, i.e. the steps that make it up and their relationships. Diagrams like this are developed by the technical partners after collecting knowledge from the cultivators and then they are shared with the cultivators in order to be validated by them. However, a computer cannot derive this information by “looking” at the diagram. After validation, they are transformed into symbolic expressions where steps and relationships are explicitly represented, using the Mingei ontology and inserted into the Mingei knowledge base. Afterwards, it can be displayed upon request and is preserved for future re-use.

Written by Carlo Meghini from ISTI CNR

Mingei Crafts Ontology

CNR is developing the Mingei Crafts Ontology (CrO) and plans to use it to build stories that share the knowledge and artefacts of these crafts. You may think of this process as a timeline composed of events related to each other through temporal, causal and inclusion relations. Each event is also linked to its components such as tools, methods, people or locations. 

To create this Crafts Ontology, luckily we don’t need to start from scratch. We are able to follow in the footsteps of Europeana, which already described cultural heritage artefacts in the European Data Model* (EDM). The EDM is defined with the scientific contribution of CNR, among others. 

In addition to the EDM, CNR previously developed an ontology for representing narratives  (as an extension of the CIDOC Cultural Reference Model**), which is the vocabulary used to describe events related to cultural heritage artefacts. Both these ontologies will be taken as reference for CNR’s attempt to define the Mingei Crafts Ontology, and they will be enriched with all the knowledge collected in the Mingei project. 

Mingei Online Platform

CNR is also involved in the development of the Mingei online platform. In particular, CNR will develop software to help annotate knowledge that is related to digital objects that are created in this project to document heritage crafts (i.e. motion capture). Additionally CNR will work on a semi-automatic tool that will help construct, manage and visualise those previously mentioned narratives.

Up until now, CNR has been working with FORTH on the definition of the software architecture of the Mingei online platform. Furthermore, CNR participated to the meeting with the Haus der Seidenkultur to capture the requirements on the representation of knowledge concerning the process of silk weaving and the documents about that knowledge. 

  *The European Data Model (EDM) is a new proposal for structuring the data that Europeana will be ingesting, managing and publishing. The Europeana Data Model is a major improvement on the Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE). Its aim is to avoid the use of different data standards within the different heritage sectors. 

**The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) provides definitions and a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation. The CIDOC CRM is intended to promote a shared understanding of cultural heritage information by providing a common and extensible semantic framework that any cultural heritage information can be mapped to.

Written by Valentina Bartalesi, CNR