Matching and analysing conservation-restoration trajectories

The context of this work is an on-going project at the French National Library (BnF), which aims at providing predictions of the documents physical state based on their conservation-restoration histories. A document can be either in a good state and available to the readers, or damaged and unavailable to them. As libraries may contain millions of documents, the manual monitoring and analysis of their physical state is not realistic in practice. We therefore propose to analyse their conservation histories in order to derive reliable predictions of their physical state. To achieve this goal, we introduce in this paper the following contributions. First, we propose a representation of a document conservation history as a conservation-restoration trajectory, and we define its different types of events. We also propose a trajectory matching process that computes a similarity score between two conservation-restoration trajectories considering the terminological heterogeneity of the events, using an ontological model that represents the domain experts knowledge. Second, we provide a trajectory analysis process which identifies the most representative sequences of events of the deteriorated documents. Finally, we propose a prediction model for the physical state of the documents based on the trajectory analysis process. We present some experiments showing the effectiveness of the matching process as well as the prediction model.

Automated summary

This paper introduces a method to predict the physical state of documents based on their conservation-restoration histories. The paper presents a representation of the conservation-restoration trajectory, a matching process, and an analysis process, and proposes a prediction model based on the analysis process.