Dear colleagues,
Within the frame of the postdoctoral project INFRA-ART, an integrated spectral library exclusively dedicated to artists' and cultural heritage materials has been developed. The INFRA-ART Spectral Library (https://infraart.inoe.ro/) is an open-access resource that was developed to support other specialists within the heritage science field that work with XRF, infrared (ATR-FTIR), or Raman spectroscopic techniques.
The database is an ongoing compilation of spectra that contains at this moment over 1000 ATR-FTIR and XRF spectra, and a preliminary dataset of Raman spectra, linked to over 500 reference materials (paint components, artist color paints, etc.). The database is keyword searchable and an interactive spectra viewer that allows users to visualize and analyze the spectra of each sample is available.
To support universal access and the reuse of scientific data, the database follows the European Commission’s recommendation on access to scientific information as well as the FAIR Guiding Principles on research data that result from publicly funded research. Users can request access to spectral data of interest via e-mail and subsequent completion of a File Access Request Form.
We invite the cultural heritage research community and other specialists in art history, conservation, or materials science to access and share this resource. Of course, your feedback is welcome. Please share your thoughts, questions, and suggestions below or e-mail us at [email protected].
Dear Ioana Maria Cortea ,
The web site is simple, efficient and well designed. The database could be very useful for the scientific community. Congratulations for this impressive work.
I always wonder how an online database would only show plots of individual spectra. Who desires to manually search through 100s or even 1000s of reference spectra, just to find the most similar to their sample spectrum? This requires automated search, everything else is a horrible waste of time...
Thanks for sharing your spectral databse. I agree with Dr. Friedrich Menges that for practical usage purposes, an open access to the archive of numerical spectra (rather than individual image plots) would be very valuable. Alternative option is to design your own spectral search via the material prominent spectral features (such as emission or absorption lines) — see e.g. Spectral Search in https://sdbs.db.aist.go.jp/sdbs/cgi-bin/direct_frame_top.cgi )
Dear Friedrich Menges and Igor Drozdovsky, thank you for your comments. We are aware that an automated spectral search would be of great use and we do plan in the future to integrate such functions within the website. With this in mind, we are open to suggestions and/or collaborations.
Although at this moment the database shows only individual (interactive) spectra, we believe that for certain types of applications, the database could be of great help, more so as each sample is accompanied by a rich set of metadata (keyword searchable).
Well, I can't help much with the web site part, but if you want I could assemble a searchable database from your spectra, to be offered among the free databases here: https://www.effemm2.de/spectragryph/down_databases.html
Ok, sounds good. We are willing to share the data in order for the scientific community to have more use of the existing datasets. I will contact you by email to set up the details. Thank you for your help.
Ioana Maria Cortea Actually, since it seems your (very nice) website already have a RESTful API architecture, you simply have to add a GET handler to furnish the data (which are natively injected into the HTML rendered in the front end, i.e. are already furnished openly to clients). It should be a simple script, almost one-liner (surely way easier than the work you have already done).
If you prefer to host a different (micro)service for it, I highly recommend FastAPI (https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/) as a framework.
In any case, it is an extremely interesting paper and nice website. I find your work incredibly important, and I would love to access your data, if possible. Good job!
Alessandro Bombini, thank you for your comments and feedback; it is much appreciated. At the moment the raw data are not available for direct download but we may implement some changes in this regard in the future. Until these changes will be implemented on the website users can request access to spectral data of interest via e-mail. So feel free to contact me for any requests ([email protected]).
Perhaps the FTIR and Raman database could benefit from the collaboration with IRUG http://www.irug.org/search-spectral-database
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