Digital meets Culture

A demonstrator developed in the frame of the Linked Heritage Best Practice Network

Linked data is seen as the enabling technology of the ‘Semantic Web’. Sir Tim Berners-Lee described this not just:

“… about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.”

The Linking Open Data Cloud (2011 version) diagram contains an impressive 311 ‘packages’ (collections of triples) of linked data showing the links between them and the sectors they are coming from. The research conducted by Linked Heritage project in to the details of these packages ‘lifted the lid’ to find a few significant and interesting facts:

Linked data is not always ‘open’ (57.4% of packages were not open licensed for re-use, 69.1% of triple were not open)
Cultural heritage is largely absent for the Cloud (CH packages only represent c5% of the packages)
Most of the links are to limited number of packages (the great majority of links were to DBpedia, GeoNames Semantic Web and Freebase)

All this led to a set of reccommendations that can be summarised as follows:

Any publication of linked data must be accompanied by a licence which makes it clear what uses can be made of the data.
The licence may be standard, e.g. provided by Creative Commons, or one created specifically by the publisher.
Not to create a proprietary format which is only intended to be used for your package;
Use standard format(s) appropriate for the type of data being published.
Consider using a cultural heritage specific format for linked data. Possible candidate formats, ones based on: EDM, CIDOC CRM, and LIDO.
Link to packages, of a general nature, which are often linked to: DBpedia; GeoNames Semantic Web; national sources of terminology (e.g. UK Postcodes);
Link to known packages in the cultural heritage, e.g.: Library of Congress Subject Headings; VIAF: The Virtual International Authority File; and Dewey Decimal Classification);
Provide a SPARQL endpoint to the package.

All this advice Linked Heritage followed in the Linked data demonstrator.

The project was able to publish a limited set of its metadata, initially from the UK Government Art collection and Photo Marburg, and latterly by packages from other partners. In the demonstrator it was possible to enable and illustrate an RDF graph and to enable a search which would not be possible from the original data, for example to carry out a query for artists born in Britain in the UK Government Art Collection (GAC) data. In the GAC data only the name of the artist is given not their country of origin. However by linking to GAC data to DBpedia data it is possible to answer this. Similar queries can also be envisaged, and this is one of the most powerful ‘selling points’ for linked data.

Pisa, 10 - 13 October 2013

Internet Festival 2013 Edition

For the Internet Festival, closed on 13th October, Incubator was the keyword for 2013.

The organizers have already published the first official data of the event:

60 countries directly or virtually represented; more than 23.000 devices connected (smartphones, pc, tablets); more than 20 locations and more than 200 expert speakers in more than 150 events; 62 laboratories, 26 panels; 18 keynote speeches.

More information available here (italian language)

The Festival explored how new information and communication technologies are like a soil capable of creating a fertile landscape for the development and growth of ideas, inventions, opportunities, products, services and start-ups, whilst also easing the current crisis, signalling the way for shared development and representing a sustainable future.
Entrepreneurs, institutions, venture capitalists, universities and research centres met and presented their projects and case histories over four days in around twenty venues across the city of Pisa.

The 2013 intense programme was based around the following subject areas:

I4C – INTERNET FOR CITIZENS

The objective of the citizens’ area is to pin down matters concerning social innovation, understood in terms of improving the quality of everyday life through the innovation of the Net. The topic of Smart Cities is to be considered from citizens’ points of view, who are both the users and the protagonists of the technological innovations changing daily life.

I4M – INTERNET FOR MAKERS

The objective of the Makers’ area was to explore the Net as an incubator for ideas and opportunities relating to work and the economy. It investigated how the web can become a vehicle for updating old business practices (which are traditionally offline) such as publishing, how Big Data can improve both new and old business practices and how the Net can create connections and relationships, which are both efficient and productive.

I4T – INTERNET FOR TELLERS

The objective of the Tellers’ area was to discuss the Net as an incubator for new information flow, generated from the mass of content poured into it. Managing this flow makes it possible to swiftly respond to potential ideas, suggest advertising, identify different target groups and be aware of public opinion and the general sentiment online.

VIDEO: Internet Festival 2013 – The digital revolution continues!

T-TOUR

The 2012 Internet Festival saw the extraordinary success of so-called T-Tours, that is, an educational and formative discovery of the Net for different age groups, competencies and interests.

SMARTUP

This year the Internet Festival introduced a new meeting point for businesses, designed not only to serve as a platform for networking, but to be a real incubator for new business opportunities and a fertile landscape for the germination of ideas.

EBOOKERIA

The book and e-book section was running creative and collective workshops as well as presentations of books and e-books that discuss the web, giving the internet careful thought and interacting with the subject in a variety of different ways.

Internet Festival is an initiative organized by Fondazione Sistema Toscana with the support of many valuable institutions.

Official website: http://www.internetfestival.it/?lang=en

Download the Press release of the Internet Festival here (italian language)

Download the Press release related to the meeting with Italian Ministry On. Carrozza here (italian language)

Download the Press release related to the session on the Smart Cities here (italian language)

Download the Press release related to the Big Data event here (italian language)

Paris (France), 14 - 15 November 2013

Europeana Photography IPR workshop in Paris

A valuable workshop organized in the framework of EuropeanaPhotography took place in Paris on 14th-15th November 2013.

The workshop was one day and half including presentations and round table discussion, focusing on IPR issues related to digital content and to the publication of images in Europeana, the European freely accessible digital library.

The event was hosted by the French partner of EuropeanaPhotography, Parisienne de Photographie, and took place during the famous international fair Paris Photo. The organization by Nathalie Doury and her team, that also included a special visit to the photographic collection of Musée Carnavalet, was excellent and warmly appreciated by the participants.

The specialized experts Angelina Petrovic and Stefan Biberfeld drove a presentation (PDF, 466Kb) and discussion about IPR applied to photography, and with a focus on photographers and third party rights (artists copyright, personality rights, etc…). The issue of orphan works was also explored, as it has a big impact on our project: this was also stated by Dimitrios Tsolis (University of Patras) while presenting the results of a survey, conducted among the Europeana Photography consortium, that highligths how about 21% of content to be contributed to Europeana is Orphan works.

A deep discussion on Europena’s Rights Labelling Campaing proceeded from the presentation by Julia Fallon (PDF, 1.79 Mb), IPR and Policy advisor at Europeana Foundation. Use-cases and true examples from the real experience of professionals and archives kept this workshop very concrete, beside the theoretical issues.

The minutes of the workshop are available here (PDF, 264 Kb).

Discover more about it in the coordinator’s blog Digital Culture by Fred Truyen.

Paris World Fair. The river Seine, the Eiffel Tower and the giant terrestrial globe at night, Paris (France), 1900, photograph by Neurdein, © Neurdein/Roger Viollet.

Valletta (Malta), 22-26 September 2013

TPDL 2013: 17th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries

The International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) constitutes a leading scientific forum on digital libraries that brings together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field of digital libraries. TPDL 2013, the 17th edition of the conference, has been organized by University of Malta and it was held in Valletta, Malta on September 22-26, 2013.

The Conference hosted the 3rd Plenary Meeting of the DCH-RP project (see more information here). DCH-RP partners joined the TPDL Conference on 24 September in the morning.

Aims & Scope

Valuable and rapidly increasing volumes of data are produced or transformed into digital form by all fields of scientific, educational, cultural, business and governmental activities. For this purpose the digital libraries community has developed long-term and interdisciplinary research agendas, providing significant results, such as conceptual models, added value infrastructures, software tools, standards and services.

The advent of the technologies that enhance the exchange of information with rich semantics is the epicenter of the discussions of the community. Information providers inter-link their metadata with user contributed data and offer new services outlooking to the development of a web of data and addressing the interoperability and long-term preservation challenges.

TPDL 2013’s general theme is “Sharing meaningful information“, and beside the Conference it will offer attendees and local participants a stimulating and informative selection of tutorials covering current topics in digital libraries and related technologies and areas of research. Moreover, the final day, September 26, 2013, after the Main Track of the conference, a series of selected Workshops is organized.

VIDEO: A short overview of the activities of the TPDL2013

Topics

General areas of interests include, but are not limited to, the following topics, organized in four categories, according to a conceptualization that coincides with the four arms of the Maltese Cross:

Foundations

Information models
Digital library conceptual models and formal issues
Digital library 2.0
Digital library education curricula
Economic and legal aspects (e.g. rights management) landscape for digital libraries
Theoretical models of information interaction and organization
Information policies
Studies of human factors in networked information
Scholarly primitives
Novel research tools and methods with emphasis on digital humanities
User behavior analysis and modeling
Social-technical perspectives of digital information

Infrastructures

Digital library architectures
Cloud and grid deployments
Federation of repositories
Collaborative and participatory information environments
Data storage and indexing
Big data management
e-science, e-government, e-learning, cultural heritage infrastructures
Semi structured data
Semantic web issues in digital libraries
Ontologies and knowledge organization systems
Linked Data and its applications

Content

Metadata schemas with emphasis to metadata for composite content (Multimedia, geographical, statistical data and other special content formats)
Interoperability and Information integration
Digital Curation and related workflows
Preservation, authenticity and provenance
Web archiving
Social media and dynamically generated content for particular uses/communities (education, science, public, etc.)
Crowdsourcing
3D models indexing and retrieval
Authority management issues

Services

Information Retrieval and browsing
Multilingual and Multimedia Information Retrieval
Personalization in digital libraries
Context awareness in information access
Semantic aware services
Technologies for delivering/accessing digital libraries, e.g. mobile devices
Visualization of large-scale information environments
Evaluation of online information environments
Quality metrics
Interfaces to digital libraries
Data mining/extraction of structure from networked information
Social networks analysis and virtual organizations
Traditional and alternative metrics of scholarly communication
Mashups of resources

During the conference (on courtesy of TPDL2013)

Download the TPDL leaflet (PDF, 160 Kb)

Follow the proceedings of the Conference on the TPDL Official Website

See the photos here

Europeana Professional Blog follows the progress of the project

EAGLE takes flight

We report below an article published on the Europeana Professional Blog*, on courtesy of Beth Daley.

“EAGLE is a best practice network that brings together the most prominent European institutions and archives in the field of Classical Latin and Greek epigraphy (epigraphy = the study of inscriptions/epigraphs), to provide Europeana with a comprehensive collection of unique historical sources which constitute a veritable pillar of European culture.

First things first, the project has a new logo. Put together with much thought, the logo represents, ‘the plethora of inscribed material to be found among the digital content provided by the project partners’ and ‘strives to conjugate aesthetic beauty with a precise conceptual line’. The images used in the logo include Sappho, and Latin and Greek inscriptions. Find out more about the stories behind the imagery on EAGLE’s blog.

Alongside the great new logo, EAGLE have also launched their website and project tagline – ‘A digital bridge to the ancient world’. The rich, detailed and intuitive website (www.eagle-network.eu) contains all the information relevant to the project, including contact information, upcoming events and schedules, and a detailed description of partner institutions and their contributions. The tagline summarises the project’s ‘brand personality’ in a way that is aesthetically pleasing and easy-to-remember.

You may have seen several posts on this blog about ‘Wiki Loves’ photography competitions – Europeana has been involved with these contests for the past few years. EAGLE is now joining in too and is offering a special prize for the best photography of ancient inscriptions within the Wiki Loves Monuments Italia contest.

Roman cities were literally strewn with written messages of the most varied nature: monumental inscriptions resulting from an intervention by the central power to propagate a certain image of itself; inscriptions posted by private parties reflecting religious convictions, professional activities, and familial ties; graffiti and occasional writings, too often ignored by history books, which stand as testimony to the nature of everyday life in its humblest and most popular aspects.

The special EAGLE prize for Wiki Loves Monuments Italia seeks to promote the intrinsic testimonial value of inscriptions and to do so in such a way that this patrimony, which exists right before our eyes but often goes unnoticed, emerges and gains the visibility that it deserves. Find out more about EAGLE and Wiki Loves Monuments Italia.

Finally, EAGLE is now active on social media so please follow them on Facebook, Twitter (@Eagle_Project), LinkedIn and Google Plus.”

By Beth Daley

Source: http://www.pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/pro-blog/-/blogs/1911032/maximized?p_p_auth=EqB4RY4W

* The Europeana Professional Blog is for people working in the field of digital cultural heritage.

A study conducted by TERENA in partnership with the Univ. of Amsterdam, LIBER and the Univ. of Debrecen

Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructures for Scientific Data in Europe

Source: www.terena.org

The final report from a European study that could pave the way to distributed and collaborative authentication, authorisation and accounting (AAA) for scientific data was published on 18 December 2012.

The AAA Study was carried out by a consortium composed of LIBER (The Association of European Research Libraries), University of Amsterdam (NL), University Debrecen (HU) and TERENA, which was the lead partner. This was the first time that TERENA and LIBER have worked together on such a project.

Managing the data glut

The rapid development and adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has changed the way researchers work, enabling almost instantaneous collaboration regardless of physical location, and has provided access to an enormous amount of scientific information that can be processed on powerful computational platforms. This new way of working generates a huge volume of data, whose exchange and curation pose significant challenges.

In 2010 the High-Level Expert Group on Scientific Data (known as HLEG on Scientific Data) published recommendations that an authentication and authorisation system should be set up by integrating existing AAA infrastructures in order to allow distributed and collaborative AAA for scientific data. To address this recommendation and to facilitate the emergence of a robust platform (Scientific Data Infrastructure (SDI)) for access to and preservation of scientific information, the European Commission funded the AAA Study, which began in December 2011. The study tender was also designed to be one step towards a Europe-wide single sign-on for all digital library and computing services for the research community.

“The improvement of access to and preservation of research publications and data, scientific collaborations and advanced infrastructures (e-infrastructures) are all important priorities for the European Commission,” explained Kostas Glinos, Head of e-Infrastructure Unit at DG CONNECT, European Commission. “Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructures (AAIs) play a crucial role in providing a distributed virtual environment where scientific resources can be stored, accessed and shared.”

The AAA Study evaluated the feasibility of delivering an integrated authentication and authorisation (and possibly accounting) infrastructure, by collecting use-cases from across different disciplines and evaluating existing infrastructures.

Key recommendations

The 60 page report resulting from the study contains a number of recommendations, which target different stakeholders: the European Commission to define a possible directive; Member States to create the conditions for such an infrastructure at national level; policy makers, particularly those involved in the Data Protection Directive, to take into account the impact of legislation on cross-boundary access management; and developers to use standard technologies to achieve interoperability.

The report highlights the following:

an AAI for SDI should be built on standard technologies, using infrastructures such as eduGAIN, eduroam and EUDAT, and mechanisms to translate between various authentication and authorisation technologies; and that federated access plays an important role;
to fully benefit from federated access, more funding is needed to improve the reach of national identity federations in research and education;
further research is needed to enhance authorisation and accounting mechanisms;
a common policy and trust framework for identity management is needed, as well as clarity on data protection laws – these should be coordinated at European level;
relevant organisations such as EGI.eu, e-IRG, EUDAT, ESFRI projects, IGTF, REFEDS (Research and Education Federations), the European Commission and consortia of libraries and data centres should all work towards these goals.

Further information

Download here the AAA Study report.

Further information about the AAA Study and recommendations is available via the AAA Study web page.

More information about TERENA is available at www.terena.org.

More about the Association of European Research Libraries is available on the LIBER website.

More about the High-Level Expert Group on Scientific Data report.

2nd EUDAT International Conference, 28-30 October 2013, Rome – Italy

All roads lead to Rome

The EUDAT project has, since its inception in 2011, always explored ways to build generic technical services that support multiple research communities. EUDAT works closely with a wide range of communities to deliver these technical services as part of the EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI). To be successful in this ambitious initiative, EUDAT is using novel methods to involve all the stakeholders, both in the discussions to determine the required services, and in the process of designing, developing and implementing those services.

The annual conference, 28-30 October 2013, Rome – Italy, is one of these many ways that EUDAT engages actively and directly with stakeholders. Through plenary sessions, parallel tracks, training courses and associated workshops participants are offered a 360° view of EUDAT existing and future services and how they will benefit both researchers and research organisations in accessing and preserving their research data.

To concretely illustrate how EUDAT collaborates closely with and directly involves other initiatives with a similar vision and an overarching goal of facilitating access to preservation of research data, a series of associated workshops will take place on Monday 28^th & Wednesday 30^th October covering from biodiversity, to Social Sciences and Humanities, to cultural heritage from research data. See the complete list at http://www.eudat.eu/eudat-2nd-conference-workshops

The parallel tracks of the conference are dedicated to showcasing both the existing and new EUDAT services which are seen as priorities for research communities and address core functional requirements of the EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI). Together with presentations, demos and training on Safe Replication, the Data Staging, the Metadata and Simple Store services, new services in the pipeline include EUDAT box – a dropbox-like service for easy sharing & local synching of data as well as generic services to handle real-time data streams and crowdsourced data, and to support semantic annotation.

Keynote presentations from the Human Brain flagship project by Richard Frackowiak, Ewan Birney on Annotating the Human Genome, Helix-Nebula the Science Cloud by Maryline Lengert and a view from across the Atlantic from Bill Michener on DataONE will be given together with the latest updates on data infrastructures in the EU’s imminent Horizon 2020 programme from the European Commission’s Kostas Glinos, European and the EUDAT story so far will be narrated by Kimmo Koski, EUDAT Project Coordinator. Progress on series of Research Data Alliance activities and working groups will round up the event.

Check out the rich three day programme at http://www.eudat.eu/events/programme-eudat-2nd-conference and register on-line. Don’t miss the early bird registration deadline on 20^th September. Follow EUDAT on Twitter @eudat_eu for conference updates.

Valletta (Malta), 26th September 2013

First Workshop on “Linking and Contextualizing Publications and Datasets”

This workshop was organized in conjunction with the 3rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2013).

Motivations

Modern scientific communities and their research infrastructures serve for discipline-specific activities whose input and output affect and are affected by scholarly communication. To cope with the increasing speed of such activities and the growing volumes of research outcome, communities need to be facilitated at publishing, interlinking, contextualizing, preserving, discovering, accessing, and reusing their research outcomes. Achieving such objectives would foster multi-disciplinarity, generate novel research opportunities, and endorse quality research. However, researchers rely on different technologies and systems to deposit and preserve their research outcome and their contextual information. Datasets and publications are kept into Digital Libraries and Data Centers together with descriptive metadata. Contextual information is scattered into other systems, for example CRIS systems for funding schemes and affiliation, national and international initiatives and registries, such as ORCID and VIAF for people and authors. The construction of Modern Scholarly Communication Systems capable of collecting and assembling such information in a meaningful way has opened up novel research challenges in the fields of Digital Library, e-Science, and e-Research.

Workshop Objectives

The goal of this workshop was to provide researchers and practitioners in the fields of Digital Libraries, e-Science, and e-Research, with a forum where they can constructively explore foundational, organizational and systemic challenges in contexts having publishing, interlinking, preservation, discovery, access, and reuse of publications and datasets as focal points. It expects to contribute to the actual picture of the state of the art approaches and solutions that researchers and practitioners active in these fields have investigated and realized.

Web site: http://lcpd2013.research-infrastructures.eu/

E-mail: lcpd2013@isti.cnr.it

Workshop topics

The workshop welcomed submissions reporting on theoretical, systemic, and foundational work targeting popular topics of linking and contextualizing datasets and publications. The topics of this workshop were of interest to, but not limited to, the following research avenues:

– Metadata formats for publications and datasets: interlinking or contextualizing research outputs.

– Metadata access services: exporting/discovering metadata to facilitate interlinking or contextualizing research outputs.

– Data models expressing relationships between publications, datasets and other information apt for re-use, contextualization, etc.

– Aggregation services: robust and scalable collection, integration, storage, interlinking, and visualization of heterogeneous objects and metadata from publication, dataset, and contextual content data sources

– Linking and contextualization services: processing/mining interlinked objects and metadata relative for enrichment, disambiguation, annotation

– Future publication models and services: novel concepts and management of enhanced publications, research objects, executable papers.

For more on these topics, please visit the workshop website.

Invited speakers

Sšren Auer, UniversitŠt Leipzig

Sarah Callaghan, British Atmospheric Data Centre, STFC

Workshop Organisers

– Lukasz Bolikowski, Centre for Open Science, ICM, University of Warsaw, Poland

– Paolo Manghi, Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione (ISTI), National Research Council – (CNR), Pisa, Italy

– Nikos Houssos, EKT, National Documentation Centre, Greece

– Jochen Schirrwagen, Bielefeld University Library, Germany

Sponsored by OpenAIREplus (www.openaire.eu) and EuroCRIS (www.eurocris.org)

Web site: http://lcpd2013.research-infrastructures.eu/

E-mail: lcpd2013@isti.cnr.it

This Workshop was organized in conjunction with TPDL 2013

just closed...exhibitions, special sessions, panels, tutorials and workshops

Digital Heritage 2013 event in Marseille

Digital Heritage 2013 is just closed.

The event was very wide including 350 presentations, some 100 full papers, 130 short and special session papers, 90 posters, 20 panels, tutorials and workshops, and 37 exhibitions.

For this reason, to provide an effective way for participants to explore such a rich and diverse program, Digital Heritage 2013 built an interactive schedule featuring social networking, a personal agenda builder, dynamic attendee directories, and more. Users can view the schedule in list, grid, and other forms as well as on mobile devices.

Users are invited to plan accordingly and note travel times between buildings in scheduling the visits. Ample ’down time’ for interaction with colleagues has been scheduled through cultural tours on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons and with a Gala Dinner on Thursday evening.

Note for the participants: if you have already registered for the congress, you will soon receive an email inviting you to add your profile (with option of bio and picture) into the interactive program. You can also tag talks you plan to attend to build a personal schedule and help us adjust room capacities.

http://www.digitalheritage2013.org/scientific-program/

This unique first ever International Congress covers heritage in all its forms, with talks grouped in 6 thematic Tracks. Alongside there are topical Special Sessions led by many federating events, from CAA to Arqueologica, and Space2Place to ICOMOS ICIP, UNESCO’s Memory of the World and Museums&Tech.

Dedicated sessions are focusing on EU projects with presentations of Europeana Photography, EAGLE, and many more.

Madrid, 16-20 September 2013

EGI Technical Forum 2013

The EGI Technical Forum 2013 took place from 16 to 20 September in Madrid at the Meliá-Castilla Hotel & Convention Centre. The event was being organised with the support of the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain, the Spanish National Research Council and Red IRIS.

The event was hosted by EGI.eu and IBERGRID, a partnership between the Spanish and Portuguese National Grid Initiatives that represents the Iberian Peninsula in EGI.

Theme

EGI has established an open compute and data infrastructure built by federating national computing and storage resources across Europe and around the world. The EGI Technical Forum reflected on the current achievements and set the course in motion for future developments. The forum focused on EGI’s strategic aims for 2020:

Support research communities and researchers to tackle societal challenges through the use of innovative technology;
Bring a federated cloud infrastructure into production to enable the work of a diverse new generation of users, while sustaining and improving the existing grid infrastructure;
Create a community of experts that use, operate, manage, develop, support and provide outreach;
Steer the financial, technical and political governance of the EGI ecosystem so that it continues to thrive for the decades to come.

In view of the growing impact and recognition that the EGI Forums have had within the grid user community, the following other conferences were also being co-located at this event:

IBERGRID 2013 19-20 Sep

EU-Brazil OpenBIO 18-19 Sep

Open Grid Forum 39 16-18 Sep

CloudPlugFest workshops 18-20 Sep

GlobusEUROPE2013 19 Sep

Co-location of these conferences aims to ensure the event was attractive to a very wide audience of technology and resource providers as well as the leaders who are at the cutting edge of research.

Further details are available via the EGI TF13 Website.

During the “VRC Project cases Whorkshop” (Wednesday 18/09, h. 14.00) there was a presentation taken by Rosette Vanderbroucke and Antonella Fresa on “An e-infrastructure for the Digital Cultural Heritage sector and the humanities research” (PDF, 1,15 MB) related to and as representatives of the DCH-RP project.