INSIGHT (Intelligent Neural Systems as Integrated Heritage Tools)

INSIGHT is an academic research project, funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO), that targets the digital assets of two museum clusters in Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and Royal Museums of Art and History. This project aims to deploy the recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (language technology and computer vision in particular) to support the enrichment of these collections with descriptive metadata. An important focus of this project is the issue of transferring knowledge from one (e.g. larger) institution, such as the Rijksmuseum, to other players in the field. To this end, we investigate issues relating to multimodality or the way in which we can simultaneously model different information streams about digital heritage objects (e.g. in different languages, or across different media). Apart from multimodality, multilinguality will be another crucial aspect of our research, which is of course important in the context of federal heritage collections in Belgium. The end goal of this project is to develop and release a series of practical Machine Learning tools for managing digital collections. The main outcome of this project will be an export of the digital collections involved in a “Europeana-ready” format, which will contribute to the broader accessibility of these collections.

Further information is available on the INSIGHT project website.