Assignment 1 of Semantic Web

The assignment we have for today is to:

Explore
the Rijksmuseum collection,
Louvre,
europeana. 
and write an analysis (a brief description of what you are discussing, along with the advantages and the disadvantages) of the following:

• information provided;
• navigational structure of the site:
  
  
  • how is information grouped,
  • how are the relations among different pieces of information made clear,
  • how does a user find related information;

Think of some questions about the artworks you would like the answer to from each of the sites. Write about your experiences in finding the answer. Try using search facilities on the site. Try exploring the site through navigation. 
Given the information available from these three sites, how would you want to access all the information? 
Write down one or two questions whose answer requires information from at least two of the sites. 
Write down an example of extra information you would want that is not available from these three sites.

Since I'm not familiar with artworks, especially occidental artworks, though interested in, it took me a bit long to explore these websites, and hopefully I can get some ideas about their information providing and structures.

The first two websites to me are more or less like the web portal: they put those important and/or interesting items on the homepage, they have category to access probably all the items that they have, and they provide search function but only at corners. Although they're similar in this sense, there are lots of differences. One of the most distinct ones is how they classify their artworks. Louvre follows a very traditional way, I would say, based on regions, time, styles, etc. There's no related items listed by one item, but all listed on lists, such as Italian Paintings. And the 'next page' would lead to the next item listed on one of those lists.

On the other hand, Rijksmuseum is more like a dictionary: it has index of artists, encyclopedia and objects. If the user has a particular purpose, it's easy to find things useful; otherwise, people like me would feel lost and even despaired. It also has a catalogue, which I followed as: catalogue - paintings - Main subject: People -

Child Group Man	Man and woman Woman Woman and child

But a big but, none of them has anything! Why they fool me like this? One more thing, there's no homepage hyperlike in lots of its webpages. What a mass.

The Europeana website is different from those two. It's mostly a database with a search engine. Users do have to know what to search so that they can reach the information, nevertherless, at least they wouldn't do those stupid things as I just did. The information is quite limited, saying the title, creator, provider, related items, etc. Here the related items are explicitly shown.

I thought several stupid questions, like 'what genres are there of paintings, and what are their features?', 'why people consider Mona Lisa/De Nachtwacht as good paintings?' The first one I could hardly find out. I only know impressionism, and could find it and its features on Rijksmuseum, but no way for others. I don't know their names. And when I searched for 'genre' in all three websites, nothing reasonable or understandable showed up.

The Mona Lisa question is answered quite ok, though the process is not so easy. There's a picture of Mona Lisa at the homepage, and it's easy to simply click it, which leads to the discription. But this description is quite short, to understand more, it's easier to search, because you wouldn't want to follow this: Home - Collection - Curatorial Departments - Paintings - Selected Works - Italian Painting - destination. But even searching has its own problem. As the most famous painting, how can the wanted result be listed at the fifth place?

But for De Nachtwacht, the description is only in Dutch! I don't mean to offensive, but I could not imagine that the description of Mona Lisa is only in Franch. I feel quite frustrated indeed, and could not explore much about the relations among items. Sorry for it.

© 非商业性转载，请署作者名并给出链接。商业性使用，请联系作者。