discoverAbility and investiGation in spAtial iconograPhic hEritage (AGAPE)

Type of project: ANR
Contract dates: 2025 - 2029
Équipe(s): BD, Origami
Responsable scientifique LIRIS: Gilles Gesquiere

Description:
With the acceleration of open data policies in France aimed at promoting the circulation and valorization of public data, and the proliferation of information on the Internet, it is now possible to access multiple multimedia contents related to cultural and natural heritage that describe or illustrate a place. AGAPE has the ambition of aggregating and processing such data, with a focus on visual-based documents (from iconography, videos to 3D point clouds, including textual descriptions). Its first objective is to conduct innovative research on the multimodal analysis, linking and confrontation of such a constellation of contents, for facilitating their structuring, restitution and understanding. For this objective, the consortium gathers two research groups from Inria/LINKMEDIA and LASTIG, respectively specialized in the learning-based linking of large multimedia collections and in content-based 2D and 3D indexing applied to spatialization, as well as the Lab from the Archives nationales de France (AnF), specialized in metadata and link modeling. This complementary expertise will bring out innovative strategies relying on multisource data modeling, multimodal entity linking and 3D indexing for spatialization in order to produce multimodal links helping in the construction of knowledge bases documenting areas of the territory. The second objective of the project is to integrate these structured data in a 3D environment allowing to showcase them in their spatial context and to propose to the user innovative paradigms of visualization, navigation and interaction. Here the project gathers two research groups from LIRIS and Inria/ILDA, which are respectively specialized in the design of reproducible and replicable models for integrating multimedia data in a nD (spatio-temporal, semantic, and thematic) environment and in modeling and visualization of spatio-temporal hypergraphs and storytelling. These skills will allow restituting the data structured in knowledge bases within a 3D+time geohistorical reference, in order to integrate them and interact with them in an appropriate and engaging manner for users. It will result in proofs of concept that AGAPE is committed to making documented open-source components, with a special care on reproducibility and interoperability with current standards, and with the key objective of going beyond the perimeter of the project sustainably and coming to support with other interdisciplinary initiatives. The exploitation of geographic visual heritage is relevant in many domains. Within AGAPE, we choose to design, evaluate and exploit the proposed tools for three investigations in SSH and Media, with archivists from AnF and IGN for the coherence and enrichment of collections, historians from laboratory Analyse Comparee des Pouvoirs (ACP) for the study of substandard housing, and journalists from France Televisions (FTV) for engagement of the general public with the territory’s heritage in the television media. Several datasets will be made available to the consortium, to meet the use cases of WP3 and nourish the research of WP1 and WP2, in particular by sharing common geographical areas. We will consider: ● Data as documentation: photographs (mainly terrestrial and oblique aerial imagery) and video content collections belonging both to public institutions (IGN, AnF) and to open data repositories, documenting the territory at different time periods, associated with heterogeneous descriptive metadata. To take into consideration data generated by AI in today’s uses, we will also consider this type of data in our work. ● Data as 3D reference: 3D open datasets including LiDAR and polygonal meshes (for instance, CityGML and IFC data available as open data).