AI for Architectural Discourse

FAIN: HD-51101-10

University of Georgia (Athens, GA 30602-0001)
Stefaan Van Liefferinge (Project Director: March 2010 to May 2011)

The creation of an ontology for architectural history to support humanities research that takes advantage of artificial intelligence technologies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a wide variety of applications. This project will apply AI methods to discourses on historic architecture, a mode of communication inside architectural history that ties together textual descriptions, representations, and structured, logical understanding of the objects under study (buildings). The aim of this project is to develop an ontology, a knowledge representation for architectural history that will make possible applying methods from AI to historic descriptions of architecture. In the long run, this project will provide the means to analyze, interrelate, and even interconvert verbal and visual descriptions and information sources, providing an orderly way to manage and process collections of information, and thus facilitate historical research.