Knowledge-based access to art collections: The KIRA system

This discussion paper represents an extended abstract of a recent publication where we presented KIRA (Knowledge-based Information Retrieval from Art collections), a system to query, browse and analyze cultural digital contents from a set of distributed and heterogeneous repositories. KIRA relies on a Big Data infrastructure with the following features: capability to gather information from different data sources; advanced data management techniques and technologies; ability to provide useful and personalized data to users based on their preferences and context. KIRA thus provides retrieval and presentation functionalities to search information of interest and present it to the users in a suitable format and according to their needs. Using ad-hoc APIs, our system can also support several applications: mobile multimedia guides, web portals to promote the Cultural Heritage, multimedia recommender and storytelling systems and so on. We discuss the main ideas that characterize the system, showing its use for several applications.