Hirohisa Fujita, Japan | ISBN: | Submitted: Jul 2, 1998

Towards a Multimedia Database of Japanese Ancient Tombs

Japanese ancient tombs, named Keyhole shaped tomb mounds, involve very interesting archaeological aspects as well as other historical monuments all overthe world. Specially, they should be analysed from many points of views: geographical situation, remains, shapes, dimensions, historical backgrounds and others. To represent effectively such a lot of information, recent multimedia techniques looks very powerful. We have been building a database of Japanese ancient tombs since 1980 in terms of the so-called character-based data. In this paper, we present our recent work to change the existing database towards the higher version based on the multimedia techniques, which include:

1) geographical information processing to generate the required distribution maps of the tombs on the 3D digital terrain data, (2) computer graphical representation of remains contained in the retrieved tombs, (3) other information retrieval functions to be required for archaeological studies on the ancient tomb period.

Our emphasis has been placed on developing of the geographical information processing system which makes it possible to retrieve most kinds of archaeological information from the distribution map on the terrain data. Precisely we aim at implementation of the system by which we can obtain all the information by starting with pointing a tomb on the distribution map. Archaeological study on the ancient tombs needs many types of information such as the terrain maps, pictures, images, characters and so on. The most specific idea of our database that all related information should be linked with the distribution map on the terrain data.

[more information]

[other authors]
KAZUMASA OZAWA

[keywords]
Database, Multimedia, Archaeology, Ancient Tomb