Silk was a major factor for progress in Europe, mostly along the Western Silk Road’s network of production and market centers. The silk trade also allowed for the exchange of ideas and innovations, having impacts at economic, technical, functional, cultural and symbolic levels. However, silk has today become a seriously endangered heritage. Although many European specialized museums are devoted to its preservation, they usually lack the size and resources to take advantage of state-of-the-art digital technologies. The aim of this paper is twofold; firstly, we introduce SILKNOW, an interdisciplinary project that has been recently funded by the H2020 Programme of the European Union in order to preserve and promote the heritage of silk textiles; secondly, we introduce a set of interactive tools related to the project.

Due to the increasing use of data analytics, information visualization is getting more and more important. However, as data get more complex, so does visualization, often leading to ad hoc and cumbersome solutions. A recent alternative is the use of the so-called knowledge-assisted visualization tools. In this paper, we present STMaps (Spatio-Temporal Maps), a multipurpose knowledge-assisted ontology-based visualization tool of spatio-temporal data. STMaps has been (originally) designed to show, by means of an interactive map, the content of the SILKNOW project, a European research project on silk heritage. It is entirely based on ontology support, as it gets the source data from an ontology and uses also another ontology to define how data should be visualized. STMaps provides some unique features. First, it is a multi-platform application. It can work embedded in an HTML page and can also work as a standalone application over several computer architectures. Second, it can be used for multiple purposes by just changing its configuration files and/or the ontologies on which it works. As STMaps relies on visualizing spatio-temporal data provided by an ontology, the tool could be used to visualize the results of any domain (in other cultural and non-cultural contexts), provided that its datasets contain spatio-temporal information. The visualization mechanisms can also be changed by changing the visualization ontology. Third, it provides different solutions to show spatio-temporal data, and also deals with uncertain and missing information. STMaps has been tested to browse silk-related objects, discovering some interesting relationships between different objects, showing the versatility and power of the different visualization tools proposed in this paper. To the best of our knowledge, this is also the first ontology-based visualization tool applied to silk-related heritage.

Historical weaving techniques have evolved in time and space giving as result more or less fabrics with different aesthetical characteristics. These techniques were transferred along the main silk production centers, thanks to the European Silk Road and creating a common European Frame on themes and techniques. These had made it complicated to determine whether a fabric corresponds to one century or another. Moreover, in order to understand their creation, it is necessary to determine the number of weaves and interlacements that each textile has, therefore, mathematical models can be extracted from these layers. In this sense, three dimensional (3D) virtual representations of the internal structure of textiles are of interest for a variety of purposes related to fashion, industry, education or other areas. The aim of this paper is to propose a mathematical modelling of historical weaving techniques by means of matrices in order to be easily mapped to a virtual 3D representation. The work focuses on historical silk textiles, ranging from the 15th to the 19th centuries. We also propose a computer vision-based strategy to extract relevant information from digital imagery, by considering different types of images (textiles, technical drawings and macro images). The work here presented has been carried out in the scope of the SILKNOW project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 769504. The results shown in the paper are preliminary and will be improved in the scope of the project.

Over the last decade, several projects have been developed to digitise and semanticise cultural heritage data. They have been developed to preserve and maintain this heritage, but also to make it accessible to all types of users and to other sectors such as tourism and education. These developments combine the use of knowledge graphs and interactive visualisation tools with web technologies. Although remarkably interesting projects have been developed, the data visualisation tools in these projects tend to focus on the project context. Consequently, it is difficult to reuse the results of these projects. In addition, there are characteristics of cultural heritage information, such as uncertainty and spatial and temporal granularity, that have not been considered, and how to deal with them has not been described. The same is true for other aspects, such as the relationships between different objects. Considering these problems, this study presents a model that formalises how to visualise this information. The design of an ontology that implements this model, based on other works such as VUMO or VISO, is described. Furthermore, the design and development of a software framework that allows the visualisation of this information through a web application are presented. The evaluation of the application of this framework in projects such as SILKNOW or Arxiu Valencià del Disseny is outlined.

This article builds on work conducted and lessons learned within SILKNOW, a research project that aimed at enhancing the preservation and digital dissemination of silk heritage. Taking the project and this heritage typology as a case study in the digital transformation of cultural heritage institutions, it illustrates specific challenges that these institutions must face and demonstrates a few innovative answers to meet those challenges. The methodology combines approaches typical of the humanities and others usual in ICT, being inductive regarding materials and methods (consisting of a detailed review of existing online repositories and research projects devoted to textile heritage) and descriptive for the results and discussion (which explain at length the development of some tools and resources that responded to the needs detected in the previous analysis). The article reports on the state of the art and recent developments in the field of textile heritage, the tools implemented to allow the semantic access and text analysis of descriptive records associated with silk fabrics, and the spatiotemporal visualization of that information. Finally, it argues that institutional policies, namely the creation and free dissemination of open data related to cultural heritage are just as important as technical developments, showing why any future effort in these areas should take data sustainability, both in its technical and in institutional aspects, into account, since it is the most responsible and reasonable approach in terms of efficient resource allocation.

Symmetry is part of textile art in patterns and motifs that decorate fabrics, which are made by the interlacement of warp and wefts. Moreover, the 3D representation of fabrics have already been studied by some authors; however, they have not specifically dealt with preserving historical weaving techniques. In this paper, we present the SILKNOW’s Virtual Loom, a tool intended to document, preserve and reproduce silk historical weaving techniques from the 15th to the 19th centuries. We focus on the symmetry function and its contribution to art history, textile conservation, and modern design. We analyzed 2028 records from Garin 1820 datasets—a historical industry that still weaves with these techniques—and we reconstructed some historical designs that presented different types of defects. For those images (including fabrics and drawings) that had a symmetrical axis, we applied the symmetry functionality allowing to reconstruct missing parts. Thanks to these results, we were able to verify the usefulness of the Virtual Loom for conservation, analysis and new interpretative advantages, thanks to symmetry analysis applied to historical fabrics.