AI for cultural heritage

Engineering for museums, archives and heritage organisations.

Museums, archives and craft organisations need their knowledge to be findable and usable, without losing its sources, its context or the limits on how it may be used. Artabel contributes the engineering: retrieval, metadata assistance and connectors between collection systems.

Discuss a heritage project How we handle permission

What we build for

Three kinds of task.

Artabel does not replace collection management systems or build central repositories. The work is narrower and more specific.

Search that names its source

A curator, a teacher or a visitor asks a question in ordinary language and gets an answer that names the record it came from.

Help a reviewer prepare metadata

Suggested fields, language variants and candidate links, offered to a person who accepts, edits or rejects them. The cataloguer remains the author of the record.

Connect collection systems

Connectors between a collection database, a website and other public-facing tools, so that published material does not have to be copied by hand.

The distinction that matters

Four facts to record separately.

Public availability is a status, restrictions are conditions, and permission to publish and permission to train a model are separate authorities. None can be inferred from another, so each is recorded on its own.

Access status, restrictions and reuse permissions in heritage material Four facts recorded separately. One: publicly accessible, meaning a person can look at it. Two: knowledge that carries restrictions, held under conditions set by a community or an institution. Three: permission to publish, which is an explicit act by someone entitled to give it. Four: permission to train a model, which is separate again and is not implied by any of the previous three. None implies another. Publicly accessible Knowledge that carries restrictions Permission to publish Permission to train a model A person can look at it. That is all it means. Held under conditions set by a community or an institution, whether or not a copy sits on a website. An explicit act, by someone entitled to perform it for that material. Separate again. Not implied by any of the three above, and not granted by silence. does not imply does not imply does not imply
Publicly reachable heritage material is not, by that fact, training data. Each of these four is established and recorded separately.

Method

What we put into the build.

Each of these is implemented in the system itself, not only written into a policy.

  • Answers name their source. An assisted output names the record behind it. Unsupported assertions are treated as defects.
  • Access control in the data layer. Restricted material can stay in a controlled repository and still be searchable by the people entitled to see it.
  • Release authority made explicit. A named role releases material. The system records who, when and on what basis.
  • Human review before publication, with correction and rejection as first-class actions, not exception handling.
  • Withdrawal is traceable. We record where material has been used, so that a withdrawal can be applied to source files, indexes and derived datasets — and so the limits, where a model has already been trained, are known rather than discovered later.
  • Portable export. An institution must be able to leave with its own data, in a documented format.
  • A manual route that still works. If the assistance is switched off, the underlying work can still be done.

Relevant experience

What we can point at.

Experience of Artabel’s director

Conversational access to a historic building

Artabel’s director built the source-grounded conversational component of the mixed-reality installation at the Ballenberg open-air museum, which lets visitors ask a farmhouse about its own history. The work was carried out in his university role, together with colleagues from the Design, Film and Art department.

A university project, listed on his profile.

Artabel AG

Document intelligence over a long archive

Ingestion, OCR and metadata extraction feeding semantic search and source-grounded answers under human review. Transferable directly: heritage archives are heterogeneous, partly analogue and full of material whose rights status varies record by record.

Commercial work. Client identities and terms are confidential; the engineering is the same.

Artabel AG

LARA — an expert method as inspectable software

A specialist risk-assessment methodology turned into structured capture, transparent calculation and auditable reporting for EPFL. The relevant skill for heritage is the same one: encoding an expert’s rules so the expert can still inspect and defend every step.

Contract research and software delivery, from 2015.

Next step

Tell us what your collection is being asked to do.

Describe a task your staff or visitors need help with today.

Start a conversation Capabilities summary