Realizing Bilingual and Parallel Access to Ukiyo-e Databases in the World

Many humanities and cultural institutions including libraries, archives, and museums started to expose digital data on the Internet, and it led to increased heterogeneous databases. In this paper we introduce a prototype system for accessing Japanese traditional fine art: Ukiyo-e woodblock printing, which retrieves multiple databases in parallel and integrates retrieved results on-the-fly. Aggregation and integration of the retrieved results from heterogeneous databases are complicated if a search is performed from multilingual sources that are accessible in an inconsistent way through a variety of interfaces and protocols. The proposed system will help users to save time, and it will allow searching and browsing multiple Ukiyo-e databases in parallel as well as displaying results in a user-friendly way by utilizing advances in information technology. It also has a facility for cross-language searching between English and Japanese, which enables English-speaking users to search databases available only in Japanese using an English query.