Florentine Coats of Arms on the Web:

The paper describes two different ways of accessing a collection of Florentine coats of arms, which was digitised and made available on the Web. One way is a traditional approach: Textual description and indexing. As heraldry uses a specific and complex terminology, the textual approach works well for experts but is insufficient for laypersons. Therefore an additional retrieval mode was chosen. It is based on the visual specification by users of the content of images contained in the coat of arms. This access mode allows users who are not experts in heraldry to access the collection.