Digital Archives and an Example of Three-Dimensional Dynamic Interface Development

MITSUHIRO TAKEMURA

(Associate Professor, Institute of Environmental Studies, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, the University of Tokyo)

Technical speech resume from WIN regular meeting

Digital archives have attracted the attention of people worldwide, and various works on digital archives have been conducted also in Japan these days. In digital archives, historic documents and cultural properties are preserved and propagated electronically using digital and network technologies, whose recent innovations have been remarkable.

The use of archived contents has many possibilities in industry, because archived contents are encoded information resources whose categorized and compiled databases can be transmitted through various media. People can send data to users all over the world with divergent categories. Moreover, people can compare and refer to information via networks. People can obtain knowledge in cyberspace without going to museums.

I have researched and developed an interface to integrate divergent information and to show the integrated information on a monitor. Here, an interface is needed to display multifactorial information and show immediately the Web sites or pictures that the user may need.

Examples of such an interface are my Home Page (http://www.media.k.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takemura/), the Kyoto Image Mapper (http://www.zukan.kyoto-archives.gr.jp/kyototm/) and the Kyoto Navigator (http://www.kyonavi.kyoto-archives.gr.jp/kyonavi/mmpt_top_ippan.html), the creation of which I supervised. For instance, the Kyoto Navigator is for navigating the town of Kyoto physically with a multiple dynamic interface. The Kyoto Navigator collects and sends to the user information on the sights and good products of Kyoto. At the same time, the Kyoto Navigator links to other Web sites through the Internet to compile this information on Kyoto. Moreover, the Kyoto Navigator does experiments to create new interfaces for information searching and to create city information and digital city portal sites.

It will be possible in the future to collect information resources from all over the world and compile them in digital archives. In this way, we can mobilize heretofore fixed, cultural heritages, compare this divergent knowledge with other bodies of information, and find other interpretations in studies.