Digital meets Culture

Gathering people from both creative industries and ICT fields in order to exchange ideas on shared strategic collaboration.

E-Space invited in CRe-AM networking session at ICT Lisbon 2015!

In force of the cooperation with sister project CRe-AM, E-Space representatives were invited to join a networking session organized by this latter in the huge EU event ICT 2015, taking place in Lisbon.

The CRe-AM networking session aims to gather people from both creative industries and ICT fields in order to exchange ideas on shared strategic collaboration. It focuses on the role of technologies and actors working as bridges between creative sectors and ICT Research & Development. Representatives of related European large clusters and initiatives will present key examples and analyses, in order to raise awareness among the ICT community about the most recent trends in the creative one. Delegates coming from Design, Art, ePublishing, Gaming, Art and Architecture industries convened to exchange ideas with ICT researchers and developers and to contribute to the discussion.

The session agenda and information are available here, and E-Space is represented by Technical Coordinator dr. Antonella Fresa (Promoter SRL) and Prof. Carla Fernandez (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), who presented the project in general and the Dance Pilot in depth. Particularly the Dance Pro tool was illustrated as a video annotator to work as digital note-book to support choreographic processes.

Other speakers at the session were Jean-Dominique Meunier (NEM) Silvia Boi (TISP project), Luis Miguel Girao (Artshare) and Frederik de Wilde (University of Hasselt).

The main outcome of the CRe-AM networking session will be a set of recommendations for the future ICT European Agenda, in order to maximise its impact on the development and adoption of new technologies for supporting the creative processes, as well as enhance existing tools and platforms to better correspond to the needs of specific creators’ groups. The session will allow the coordination of different EC initiatives working at the bridge of technology and creative industries, and its outcomes will enrich CRe-AM roadmaps with a better understanding of cross-sectorial trends and engagement with potential users.

More info: http://www.cre-am.eu/join-cre-am-at-ict2015/

Important speakers and wide participation awarded the event organized by RICHES project

RICHES POLICY SEMINAR, Brussels, 19 October 2015

“NEW HORIZONS FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE – Recalibrating relationships: bringing cultural heritage and people together in a changing Europe”.

The Policy Seminar of the RICHES project (Renewal, Innovation and Change: Heritage and European Society) just concluded. The scope of the seminar was to discuss how the project can provide insights to support evidence-based policymaking in Europe. The event, organized in cooperation with the Project Officer was held at the Nowotny Auditorium, Covent Garden building of the European Research Council.

The Seminar comprised political updates by representatives from the European Parliament and the European Commission, the presentation of policy recommendations from the RICHES project and a Round Table discussion involving major stakeholders.

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Speakers at the Policy Seminar included personalities and experts as Maria Da Graca Carvalho, Senior Adviser in charge of cultural heritage in the Cabinet of Commissioner Carlos Moedas, DG RTD, Federico Milani, Deputy Head of Unit, DG CONNECT, Unit “Creativity”, Jens Nymand Christensen, Deputy Director General, DG EAC; Prof. Neil Forbes, RICHES Project Coordinator, Coventry University; Dr. Antonella Fresa, RICHES Technical Coordinator; Dr. Artur Serra, i2CAT Foundation; Dr. Dick van Dijk, WAAG Society; Prof. Charlotte Waelde, University of Exeter. Dr. Silvia Costa, MEP, President of the Culture Committee of the European Parliament, was eventually unable to join but delivered a message.

Prof. Gábor Sonkoly, Vice-Dean of International Affairs, Faculty of Humanities – Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest was the chair of a Round table discussion including as pannelists Nathalie Doury, Parisienne de Photographie; Paul Klimpel, Lawyer and expert on IPR for digital cultural heritage; Philippe Keraudren, Deputy Head of Unit, DG RTD, Unit “Reflective Societies”; Victoria Walsh, Professor at the Royal College of Art, London, Head of Programme Curating Contemporary Art.

View here details of the speakers and panellists of the Policy Seminar.

The policies presented by RICHES are related to the need to develop and use a common taxonomy, innovation in copyright frameworks and open access to data and information, and co-creation practices to facilitate innovation in the cultural heritage sector – all with the purpose of overcoming a range of barriers and constraints.

Here you can find the presentations delivered during the Policy Seminar: http://www.riches-project.eu/first-policy-seminar.html

The event was preceded in the morning by a Networking Session where invited participants in EC-funded projects discussed aims and achievements in the light of establishing new, profitable collaborations and synergies. Read more about the 13 project involved here: http://www.riches-project.eu/networking-session.html

The RICHES project office, dr. Zoltán Krasnai, commented the day after the event: “I am very proud of the RICHES project and the policy seminar so professionally organised and managed yesterday. I found the seminar very successful from several points of view: it gave the opportunity for networking among many projects and organisations from much different backgrounds; we had high quality policy updates from DG EAC and the cabinet of Commissioner Moedas; we had concise, very well-structured presentations of the policy recommendations of RICHES and the work of RICHES in general; we had a vivid round-table discussion among enthusiastic professionals with different backgrounds in CH management, research, promotion and policy making. Also, the seminar showed the complexity of research and policy domains covered by cultural heritage and the fragmentation of CH stakeholder communities. Any European policy efforts to move forward a more integrated approach toward cultural heritage has to deal with and overcome this stakeholder fragmentation. I look forward with the greatest interest to the second policy seminar.“

Interested on the RICHES project? Subscribe to the RICHES newsletter to receive updates, by emailing info@riches-project.eu

Follow the project updates on twitter! #richesEU

Panel including E-Space, RICHES, Civic Epistemologies and Photoconsortium was included in this important UK event

From Digitization to Preservation, Creative Re-Use of Cultural Content, and Citizen Participation – goes to DCDC2015

From Digitization to Preservation, Creative Re-Use of Cultural Content, and Citizen Participation is the title and theme of this workshop presented within the conference DCDC2015 Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities, in Manchester on 14 October 2015. Following the good results of the similar panel presented at DH15 in Granada, the workshop presented an overview of initiatives and EU projects such as Europeana Space, RICHES, Civic Epistemologies, Photoconsortium.

DCDC2015: Exploring new digital destinations for heritage and academia brought together over 70 speakers from across the UK, Europe and further afield exploring key questions facing the future of digital engagement.

Neil Forbes and Sarah Whatley from Coventry University, and John Balean international marketing manager of the photographic archive Topfoto.co.uk and member of CEPIC and BAPLA presented the different projects and invited the audience to a question and answer session. This was probably one of the few sessions of the conference that had a confident European focus, most other presentations were focused on UK activities and projects (even though the delegates were international). There was interesting discussion about crowdsourcing, the citizen participation to research and the role researcher possibly being threatened by the apparently popular expectation that all knowledge should be made available for free.

Download the presentation (PDF, 2,8 Mb)

Website of the event: http://www.rluk.ac.uk/dcdc15/. Videos of the sessions will be available in the website.

Rotterdam, 7-8 December 2015

DISH conference upcoming! with 2015 theme: Money and Power

On December 7th and 8th 2015 the next edition of DISH, the conference about digital strategies for heritage, will take place in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The theme for DISH2015 is Money and Power.

About DISH
Digital Strategies for Heritage (DISH) is the bi-annual international conference on digital heritage and the opportunities it offers to cultural organisations. Triggered by changes in society, heritage organisations face many challenges and need to make strategic decisions about their services. This year the fourth edition of the Digital Strategies for Heritage conference is jointly organised by the DEN Foundation (Digital Heritage Netherlands), Het Nieuwe Instituut and Europeana.

Theme and tracks
On the DISH website you can read more about the main theme Money and Power. The four tracks that accompany this theme are: Lose your modesty!, Stand up for yourself!, Lose control, gain influence! and Power to the people!.

Speakers are announced and the preliminary programme is online

For more information and tickets, please see www.dish2015.nl. Have any questions or suggestions? You can reach us contact DISH@den.nl or send a tweet to @DISHconference!

Bangkok, 23-27 November 2015.

VICTA: Visions on Internet of Cultural Things and Applications – workshop at SITIS conference 2015

The international workshop on Visions on Internet of Cultural Things and Applications (VICTA) is part of the 11th International Conference on Signal Image Technology & Internet Based Systems (SITIS 2015), being held in Bangkok, Thailand, on 23-27 November 2015.

The adoption of Future Internet (FI) technology, and in particular of its most challenging components like the Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Services (IoS), can constitute the basic building blocks to progress towards unified ICT platforms for a variety of applications within the large framework of smart cities.
The combination of the Internet and emerging technologies such as near-field and BLE communications, real-time localisation and embedded sensors lets us transform everyday objects into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment.
In the last years, Cultural Heritage has turned out to be one of the most suitable domains in which such achievements can be profitably exploited, since it characterises a domain where several aspects have to be considered at the same time.
In line with SITIS’ tradition of promoting interdisciplinary research, the international workshop on Visions on Internet of Cultural Things and Applications, VICTA 2015, aims to be a profitable informal working day to discuss together hot topics about Internet of Things and its applications to Cultural Heritage.
This second edition of VICTA will be organised by DATABENC, the high technology
district for Cultural Heritage in Campania Region, Italy.

All the papers accepted for the workshop will be included in the conference proceedings. The proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society.
Contents will be submitted to the indexing companies for possible indexing. They will be available at the conference.
An extended version of the selected accepted papers will be considered for publication in special issues of a major journal.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) aspects of:

Internet of Things
Smart Objects
Multimedia applications and services
Embedded platforms and sensors
Multimedia recommendations and User profiling techniques
Interactive 3D media and immersive environments
Data in social networks
Data collection and management
Semantic-Web data
Big Data Analytics

Committee

Workshop Co-Chairs:

Angelo Chianese, University of Naples Federico II, Italy
Francesco Piccialli, University of Naples Federico II, Italy

Programme Committee

Miodrag Bolic, University of Ottawa, CANADA
Massimo De Santo, University of Salerno, ITALY
Antonio Picariello, University of Naples “Federico II”, ITALY
Vincenzo Moscato, University of Naples “Federico II”, ITALY
Giuseppe De Pietro, ICAR-CNR, ITALY
Luigi Gallo, ICAR-CNR, ITALY
Carles Gomez, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, SPAIN
Dimitros Buhalis, Bournemouth University, UK
Eleonora Borgia, IIT-CNR, ITALY
Rob Law, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, CHINA
Salvatore Cuomo, University of Naples “Federico II”, ITALY
Giancarlo Fortino, University of Calabria, ITALY
Tsvi Kuflik, Haifa University, ISRAEL
Phivos Mylonas, National Technical University of Athens, GREECE

For further info visit the event website or contact victa2015.info@gmail.com

Brussels, 13 October 2015

E-Space at the JPEG workshop on Privacy and Security

by Frederik Temmermans, iMinds

On the 13th of October 2015, the Joint Pictures Experts Group (JPEG) organised a workshop in Brussels on privacy and security support for image data. Privacy and security is becoming steadily more important seen the fact that image collections are increasingly more stored in distributed and cloud repositories rather than in private repositories. Moreover, social media and online photo repositories, for example, are currently offering insufficient means to secure privacy-sensitive information carried by the picture or to signal associated IPR metadata.

Privacy and security concerns and handling IPR is critical when dealing with digitised cultural heritage content; hence they are an important focus of the E-Space project. An overview of state of the art solutions and standards was presented during the IPR workshop taking place in March 2015 in Coventry (UK).

During the JPEG workshop in Brussels roles were reversed. JPEG experts wanted to learn from actors in the field about their needs related to privacy and security and as such shape the development of future standards. The workshop was targeted on understanding industry, user and policy needs in terms of technology and supported functionalities.

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As such, it comes as no surprise that E-Space was well represented during this event. Peter Schelkens and Frederik Temmermans from iMinds are both members of the organising committee; Charlotte Waelde and Fred Truyen, from the University of Exeter and KU Leuven respectively, delivered a presentation during the workshop.

Presentation by Charlotte Waelde, entitled “Cultural Heritage, Copyright and Code: Europeana Space as a case study” focused on lessons learned during the E-Space project related to dealing with intellectual property right in the cultural heritage sector.

Fred Truyen’s presentation, “Publishing Archival Photographs: concerns, pitfalls and their technical implications” (PDF, 4.5 Mb), gave an overview of the experienced challenges related to providing public access to photographic content and announced the E-Space Photography Hackathon on February 2016.

More information can be found on the jpeg.org website.

Additional information on the new Privacy and Security work item is also available here.

Brussels, 13 November 2015

Open ICT Standards for Public Procurement: Fostering Interoperability

The Scenario

Under Digital Agenda, the European Commission commits itself through Action 23 to provide guidance on the link between ICT Standardisation and Public Procurement in order to help public authorities use standards to promote efficiency and reduce lock-in.

As a matter of fact, using open ICT standards results in:

Higher savings when procuring ICT
An increased level of competition among suppliers
Being compliant with EU Public Procurement directives

The Workshop

If you are involved somehow in ICT procurement and want to know how other organizations similar to yours are successfully dealing with ICT “lock-in” when procuring their ICT Systems, you are warmly invited to attend the “Open ICT Standards for Public Procurement: Fostering interoperability” workshop, taking place in Brussels – at DG CONNECT – on November 13th, 2015.

The Workshop will be a great opportunity to meet MSP members, procurement managers, policymakers and ICT suppliers to discuss how to effectively reduce lock-in by using Open ICT Standards.

Main goals of the event:

Present the European Catalogue of ICT technical specification for public procurement and how it will contribute to the Digital Single Market
Provide some suggestions on how to reduce lock-in when procuring ICT
Share good practice examples on how to procure ICT on the basis of standards.

For further information please visit the Workshop webpage.

Amsterdam, 3-4 November 2015

Europeana Network Association AGM 2015

“We are Europeana”

The Europeana Network Association Annual General Meeting (AGM) is an annual key event for Europeana and its network. It provides the opportunity for Europeana and its partners for all to share, discuss and develop specific areas of mutual interest.

The 2015 edition of this event will start on Tuesday afternoon 3 November and will continue until Wednesday 4 November. During the AGM delegates will reflect on the work accomplished in 2015 and look ahead to the challenges and opportunities for the coming years.

Furthermore, part of the meeting will reflect on the Europeana elections, which will have an important role in our future; more information about this topic will be added to this page soon. 31 candidates have come forward to campaign for seven places on the Europeana Network Association Members Council, and the voting begins on 3 November.

Early Bird Registration: please register here

Draft agenda

Pakhuis De Zwijger, Tuesday 3/11/2015
09:00-14:00 Pre conference meetings (Invite only)

14:00-14:10 Welcome and Agenda overview
14:10-14:50 TRACK 1: Europeana Network Association General Assembly
14:50-15:30 Keynote: Colin Moon
15:30-15:45 Comfort break
15:45-16:15 Ignite Talks – Round 1
16:15-16:45 TRACK 2: Taking a Commons approach
16:45-17:30 Speaker: Michel L. Roger Jr. (tbc)
17:30 End of day 1
19:00 Social event

Pakhuis De Zwijger, Wednesday 4/11/2015
10:00-10:10 Day introduction and agenda
10:10-10:40 Ignite Talks – Round 2
10:40-11:10 TRACK 3: Europeana towards 2020
11:10-11:40 Task Force updates
11:40-12:10 BP 2015 to 2016 – Europeana team leads
12:10-12:45 Re-Use best practices
12:45-14:00 Lunch
14:00-14:10 TRACK 4: Europeana Innovations
14:10-15:00 Europeana towards 2016
15:00-15:20 Speaker 3: Laurent Gaveau
15:20-15:45 Comfort break
15:45-16:30 Speaker 4: European Commission: Mr. Javier Hernández-Ros
16:30-17:00 Wrap-up, AGM 2016, Next steps
17:00 End

Half a day of pre-conference meetings on 3 November will be arranged for specific Network activities.

AGM 2015 Event page: http://pro.europeana.eu/event/europeana-annual-general-meeting-2015

An open source validator for different file formats and Submission Information Package (SIP)

KOST-Val released by the TI/A Standard Initiative team

KOST-Val is an open source validator for different file formats (TIFF, SIARD, PDF/A, JP2, JPEG) and Submission Information Package (SIP).

It has been developed by KOST-CECO, is a Swiss coordination office which is member of the TI/A Standard Initiative team, a group of experts focussing on the definition of a specification of a Archival TIFF Format

For futher information visit the KOST-Val page in the Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry (COPTR).

Funtional Principle

KOST-Val complies with the following requirements.

TIFF validation: KOST-Val reads a TIFF file and uses JHOVE to validate the structure, the content, and ExifTool to validate the key properties such as compression, colour space, and multipage. These properties can be configured.
SIARD validation: KOST-Val reads a SIARD (eCH-0165 v1 ) file and validates the structure and the content.
PDF/A validation: KOST-Val reads a PDF or PDF/A file (ISO 19005-1 and 19005-2) and uses 3-Heights? PDF/A Validator by PDF-Tools or PDF/A Manager by PDFTron to validate the structure and the content of the PDF file. KOST-Val organises the different error messages into main categories such as fonts, graphics, and metadata. KOST-Val supplies only a limited version from 3-Heights? PDF/A Validator by PDF-Tools. Module J extracts (with iText) and validates the JPEG and JP2 images contained in the PDF file (depending on the configuration). It is also possible to configure whether the JBIG2 compression is accepted or not.
JP2 validation: KOST-Val reads a JP2 file (ISO 15444) and uses Jpylyzer to validate the structure and the content.
JPEG validation: KOST-Val reads a JPEG file (ISO 10918-1) and uses Bad Peggy to validate the structure and the content.
SIP validation: KOST-Val reads an SIP (eCH-0160 v1 as well as Swiss Federal Archives SFA v1 and v4 ) and validates the mandatory requirements of the SIP specification. The validated requirements are organised into groups such as folder structure, schema validation, and checksum validation. At the outset, a file format validation is performed.

The results (including information on inconsistencies and errors) are output for every step and written into a validation log. The validation steps are executed sequentially. Whenever possible the validation shall continue after an error has been detected in order to reduce the number of correction cycles.

Third-party applications

KOST-Val uses unmodified components of other manufacturers by embedding them directly into the source code. Users of KOST-Val are requested to adhere to these components’ terms of licence.

The TIFF validation module uses JHOVE and ExifTool and evaluates its output further.
For the PDF/A validation module PDF-A Manager or 3-Heights PDF/A Validator are used.
The JP2 validation module uses Jpylyzer and translates the failed tests into appropriate error messages (DE/FR/EN).
The JPEG validation module uses Bad Peggy and evaluates the error message “Not a JPEG file” further.
To extract the JPEG and JP2 images from PDF/A the iText library is used.
For the file format identification DROID is used. For performance and granularity reasons an own SignatureFile is used instead of the official PRONOM registry.

About the TI/A Standard initiative

The TI/A Standard initiative is promoted by the Digital Humanities Lab of the University of Basel, the Agents Research Lab of the University of Girona and Easy Innova with the support of many interested memory institutions.

This standard will be created in parallel with DPF Manager, an open source TIFF format validator that, in addition to the current TIFF ISO Standards, will be the first conformance checker for the TI/A new standard.

This initiative has been boosted by PREFORMA, a PCP project that aims to address the challenge of implementing good quality standardised file formats for preserving data content in the long term.

Tuesday 13 October 15:00 BST / 16:00 CET

From the Toolbox: veraPDF webinar

veraPDF is developing the definitive open source, file-format validator for all parts and conformance levels of ISO 19005 (PDF/A). The software is designed to meet the needs of memory institutions responsible for preserving digital content for the long term.

The webinar covers the work the veraPDF consortium have done so far on PREFORMA project. This includes the initial implementation of the PDF/A-1B validation model, the details on the latest 0.4 code release and plans for upcoming releases. We also discuss the integration points and extensibility of the framework to cover additional requirements on PDF documents.

For more information on veraPDF visit http://verapdf.org/