**1. Introduction**

The mosaic represents a category of monumental art in which the decorative technique of assembling small pieces of ceramic materials, glass, natural stone, etc. is used by gluing them together with a suitable adhesive. The mosaic has a strong visual effect of esthetic nature and is characterized by a high resistance to wear and moisture. Thus, mosaics are an artifact commonly found in archeology specific to many cultures and civilizations since ancient times. As a decorative art and for monumental design, the mosaic technique is also present in the modern and contemporary era.

The mosaic is a component of the tangible immovable cultural heritage when it is found as a work of decorative art within monuments or archeological sites.

Ancient mosaics, especially from the Roman period, represent a distinct form of monumental art frequently used on pavements. However, the archeological research of the mosaic floors raises certain problems due to the peculiarities of this type of artifact, namely, the large surface, the uneven wear of the component elements, the degradation of the decorative structure, and the chromaticity of the elements. The investigations on the cultural heritage line encounter problems related to the originality of the work as a whole and to the identification of the elements completed during the possible restorations, as well as the establishment of their chronology [1].

In general, investigations on cultural heritage involve human expertise on the one hand and the involvement of appropriate analysis technologies on the other. Currently, the field of cultural heritage research benefits from information technology in different forms—from traditional databases, digital multimedia archives, to advanced image analysis tools, big data knowledge discovery, and cognitive computing.

The involvement of computer science in archeology has been discussed since the early 1970s by James Doran in his pioneering work [2]. He points out that archeologists collect large amounts of data on complex problems in which information is poorly structured, so the use of computer applications would be indispensable. The major challenge in the field of archeological information is the management of imperfect knowledge in terms of uncertainty and incompleteness of facts. For several decades, human experts have relied on software applications for support in their decisions.

Expert systems are the most popular tools capable of performing logical deductions and automatic reasoning in distinct fields using existing facts and knowledge currently provided by human experts. **Table 1** contains a presentation of knowledge-based applications of expert system type and simulation programs in the field of archeology and cultural heritage investigation, published until 1996 and cited in [3]. Over the last two decades, computer applications have evolved from standalone products to computer systems based on distributed networks and data capable of integrating and accessing multimedia information. Cognitive computing and big data are current benchmarks of information technology that give considerable impetus to the development of artificial intelligence applications in various fields, including archeology [4]. In support of information management in the field of cultural heritage, several major projects, generally funded by the European Union, have been developed.

form the basis of a logical inference system for estimating the conservation status

*Examples of archeological applications which handle knowledge by means of artificial intelligence [3].*

*Automation of the Expertise of the Roman Mosaic Arts in Constanta: Analytical and Statistical…*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.92679*

The field of cultural heritage research is multi- and interdisciplinary. The work

of the experts in this field is quite complex, having the task of identifying and documenting as accurately and completely as possible the artifacts, to monitor their condition in order to make the most appropriate decisions regarding the interventions for the maintenance and restoration of the objects. The main issue of the cultural heritage expert is knowledge management, which is mainly based on col-

archeologists, plastic artists, ethnographers, and increasingly with specialists in transversal disciplines contributing to the investigation process: chemists, physicists, geologists, biologists, as well as computer scientists. Therefore, the major effort consists in merging information from different fields in an attempt to obtain a consolidated knowledge system regarding the heritage object. Three basic steps

laborative work with specialists from complementary fields: historians,

are distinguished in the formation of a knowledge system:

**2. Sources for the construction of the knowledge treasure**

and the degree of intervention on the mosaic.

**Table 1.**

**257**

A distinct category of projects is aimed at digitizing museums and archeological sites, for example, the SMARTMUSEUM (Cultural Heritage Knowledge Exchange Platform) project is a research and development project sponsored under the European Commission's 7th Framework (FP7–216923), as well as the multitude of applications in the field of virtual museums and virtual archeology [5]. All these information technologies together with the advancement of the physical investigation methods of the artifacts, which can provide more and more detailed data related to the nature and structure of the materials, contribute to the development of knowledge-based systems in the field of cultural heritage [6, 7].

In the case of mosaics, as a kind of intangible and immovable cultural heritage, an essential activity is the expertise of the artifact status based on the data on the historical background, the artistic characteristics, the physical structure and condition, as well as possible interventions on it in a certain context.

The first step of the expertise consists in collecting the data and organizing them as characteristic vectors for the classification of the studied objects. The next step is to convert the data into knowledge and make up the pieces of knowledge that will

## *Automation of the Expertise of the Roman Mosaic Arts in Constanta: Analytical and Statistical… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.92679*


#### **Table 1.**

*Examples of archeological applications which handle knowledge by means of artificial intelligence [3].*

form the basis of a logical inference system for estimating the conservation status and the degree of intervention on the mosaic.
