Charles University is the oldest university in Central Europe. The Faculty of Philosophy offers the study program "Art History" at the magisterial (undergraduate) level. A group of Art History students approached CTU and asked if they could participate in the CIPHER project.

The Art History student group was interested in popularising the basics of art history with a focus on visitors of historical cities and monuments.

The main activity in the trial was to create a typology of palace facades. The topology was used to produce an interactive dictionary to be used an educational resource with undergraduate art history students. Their work was supported by a professional historian from the National Monument Institute.

Apollo was used to produce a conceptual map of palace facades. The Picture Annotation Tool (PAT) was motivated by feedback from this trial. PAT enables annotations to be associated with regions of an image.

• The students successfully created an ontology of palace facades that has since been used to develop an interactive dictionary.
• Feedback from the use of Apollo suggested that being able to identify examples of architectural concepts directly on digital images would be a useful extension for this application. This new facility is being developed under the name Picture Annotation Tool (PAT).
• The future plans of the community include presenting dynamic stories of several of the most important palaces in the Czech Republic using the content acquired in this trial.

Contact: Zdenek Kouba (kouba@labe.felk.cvut.cz)