Revisiting 3D information landscapes for the display of art historical web content

Abstract

As of today, a lot of different approaches have been dealing with the presentation of art history resources on the Web. While the majority of these focused on traditional 2D methods of display, some did introduce the application of 3D visualization metaphors. Such environments were, however, usually tailored to a specific collection or topic, such as a featured artist or epoch. Meanwhile, the increasing availability of valuable metadata resources has opened up the perspective for the automatic creation of such 3D environments by integrating semantic data sources through the Web. In this work we therefore present a prototype that automatically constructs a 3D environment from semantic art history related Web resources, offering users the opportunity to explore art history following the visualized structure of relations between historical actors of the field. Traversing this historical social network enables users to encounter previously unknown artists and their work in a serendipitous way.