A Multimedial Database System - Managing a Virtual Collection of Art and Architectural Works

In 1993, The Faculty of Architecture and Fine Arts, Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile, decided to create a virtual collection of art and architectural master pieces,mainly of national and Latin American origin. The faculty does not own the works themselves, but a collection consisting of visual representations of each work, including drawings, video, slides and other audiovisual material. The initiative of assembling the collection is based on the difficulty of access to these works, spread over the world, as well as in the collection process and preservation of visual information consisting in original documents and architectural drawings, slides, photographs, and other visual media. This has been a difficult task due to the natural deterioration of this kind of media. The knowledge of masterpieces and work of outstanding artists and architects is a basic theme in the study and research in the Faculty. The access to a virtual collection of patrimonial work in these areas provides a new way of research with great impact in the education of students in our faculty as well as schools and other public institutions. Nowadays advances in technology make us think of a new way of preservation and retrieval of visual information. High quality images, hypermedia, communications and network technology, allow the retrieval of integrated information in different media including high quality still images, audio, video and text. Moreover, the significant growth observed in Internet and specially in the World Wide Web, constitutes apowerful media to provide worldwide access to multimedia1information. The project, in development process, has the participation of amultidisciplinary team, administrated by the Art and Architecture Faculty. The National Art Museum is collaborating with production tasks providing information and visual material of the collection and the relevant exhibitions that occur throughout the year. The cataloging process is being done by the university Library System experts. Software engineers from the university "Computing, Information and Communication Service" are in charge of all the technical issues and software development. The project is conceived in several stages, each of them concerned with technology evaluation and acquisition issues, software development and production tasks for collection and cataloguing of information. The first stage was concentrated in the analysis of the system information and hnctional requirements, considering the users' characteristics and needs. The design and development process focus in user-interface design aspects, data modeling, and evaluations of technology in image processing, file format standards, multimedial software development tools relational database servers, and client-server technology. A special emphasis has been made to have a graphical oriented, easy to use and intuitive interface to access the data, oriented to the viewing of images and providing flexible access to integrated information in several types of media. The database stores relevant information of art and architectural masterpieces. The user is allowed to search by several criteria and browse the information of the works and authors intuitively through a graphical oriented interface. This paper describes the design and development process of the multimedial database system built to manage and retrieve the virtual collectionof art and architectural works.