Thai Arts and Culture Project

30 March, 2009 8:13 PM

In the face of social and cultural changes the disappearance of Thai arts and cultural artifacts has amplified the weakening social cohesion and diminishing local values in Thailand. To some extent, this evaporation results in social disorganization and disintegration of community network. The project investigates how communities are found accessing a digitalized collection of Thai arts and cultural heritages via the Internet. The expected results will demonstrate that there will be improved opportunities for strengthening social cohesion and mutual understanding of local arts and cultural inheritances. Thus it promotes a sense of belongings that revitalizes local values under globalization. Furthermore, it brings positive ripple effects on e-Tourism that may contribute in many ways.

For an ontology-driven e-Tourism information system, a digital resource of e-Tourism is selected for ontology. It can be considered as artistic and cultural objects that belong to local community. The objects have a certain value and must be appropriately promoted, used and digitalized in the domain of tourism. In this case, an ontology is used as a collection of existing items with formal specification of their features such as place, name, location, size and color. Our aim is to support the implementation of an advanced Web (The Semantic Web) that provides better knowledge management activities online. Its merit lies in the semantic web. It includes reasoning capability to a tourist query, for example, “Where is Wat Chiang Man?” With semantic information “Wat Chiang Man is the oldest Buddhist temple in Chiang Mai”, “Chiang Mai is located in northern Thailand”. We can answer the query “Wat Chiang Man is located in northern Thailand.”

  • WHAT: Thai Arts and Culture
  • HOW: Seeking Grants
  • WHEN: June 2008 -
  • WHO:
    • Dr. Seung Hwan Kang (Project Leader, Computer Information Systems)
    • Thoranin Intarajak (Lecturer, Computer Information Systems)
    • Dr. Jira Yammeesri (Lecturer, University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce)

References

  1. Fensel, D., Hendler, J., Lieberman, H. and Wahlster, W. (2003) Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential, The MIT Press.
  2. Gómez-Pérez, A., Fernandez-L๓pez, M. and Corcho, O. (2002) Ontological Engineering: with examples from the areas of Knowledge Management, e-Commerce and Semantic Web, Springer Verlag.
  3. Hendler, J. (2001) Agents and the Semantic Web, The IEEE Intelligent Systems, (Mar./Apr.), pp. 30-37.
  4. Jasper, R. and Uschold, M. (1999) A Framework for Understanding and Classifying Ontology Applications, in Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence Workshop on Ontology, 31 July – 6 August, City Conference Center, Stockholm, Sweden, pp. 11-1-11-12.
  5. Prantner, K. Ding, Y. Luger, M. and Yan Z. (2007) Tourism Ontology and Semantic Management System: state-of-the-arts analysis, in Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2007, 5 – 8 October, Vila Real, Portugal, pp. 111-115.
  6. Uschold, M. and Gruninger, M. (1996) ONTOLOGIES: Principles, Methods and Applications, Knowledge Engineering Review, 11(2), pp. 93-155.

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