Advanced Linking and Exploitation of diGitized geOgRaphic Iconographic heritAge – ALEGORIA

The ALEGORIA project aims at facilitating the promotion of iconographic institutional funds collections describing the French territory in various periods going from the interwar period to our days. The collections in sight are of variable sizes, between thousands and hundred thousand elements, and are constituted by iconographic representations, which are most of the time oblique, vertical aerial or terrestrial photographs of the environment. Contrary to the well anchored exploitation which is made of the satellite imagery where the professional practices are many (scientists, civilians and militaries) and the data well identified and indexed, the promotion of those collections remains confidential and scattered. They are spread within various institutions, digitized partially, generally not or little documented and weakly georeferenced. Nevertheless they represent a rich heritage, little known by the general public and exploited in a way forced by their main users (researchers, institutions and local authorities), in direct consultation at the library or by means of online classic digital libraries. The development of such a heritage would benefit from tools allowing to automate their collection, their processing and their indexing, inside the collection itself but also between collections, to be capable of crossing them and then of studying them better. Their implementation within applications implies to facilitate their apprehension by users not specialists, it supposes to supply friendly tools for the visual exploration of these collections.

To answer these assessments, ALEGORIA gathers partners having different and interdisciplinary profiles:
• Two STIC research laboratories: LaSTIG of the French mapping agency, and LIRIS of The École Centrale of Lyon, both in charge of the methods for the analysis, the comparison and the indexing by content and by metadata of these collections;
• Four GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archive and Museums): the photo library of the IGN, the French National Archives, the Nicéphore Niépce museum and the photo library of the communication department of the French Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy;
• Two research laboratories in human and social sciences: LAVUE of the University Paris Ouest Nanterre and LIRSA of Cnam, who bring two use cases in this domain where automatic tools for the structuring of the contents are generally infrequent, while the local initiatives and the needs to exploit photographic contents are many.

Within this context, ALEGORIA will have for objectives the implementation of two online innovative platforms of demonstration dedicated to the promotion of the dematerialized and digital iconographic geographical heritage:
• A multimodal and large-scale engine of indexing and retrieval, coupling search by content and by metadata in intra-domain collections as well as cross-domain collections;
• An engine for the immersive display of these contents, allowing spatiotemporal navigation and interaction in the 3D environment enriched with ancient photographic collections.