Digital meets Culture

Brussels, end of January - beginning of February 2014

PREFORMA presented at OFA Event & FOSDEM 2014

Between the end of January and the beginning of February 2014, researchers and practitioners from the PREFORMA project had several extremely interesting discussions at the OFA event and at FOSDEM.

PREFORMA researchers at the OFA-event

At the OFA event (28 February 2014), the University of Skovde presented the PREFORMA project and the reaction was very positive. Several key players in the “open” world now know about the project (including some legal experts on Open Source and public sector procurement). After presenting the general process, very useful informal discussions followed concerning the legal and procurement challenges that PREFORMA is facing.

Web90-FOSDEM2014-PreformaResearchers-at-LegalTrack_DSC_0061

The PREFORMA project participating in the legal track at FOSDEM.

At FOSDEM 2014, Jonas Gamalielsson, Bert Lemmens and Björn Lundell met Peter Bubestinger, who is working for “Österreichische Mediathek”, Austria’s national A/V archive in the video department. The discussion covered various challenges related both to Open Source implementations of file formats in the AV-domain and to requirements from the memory institutions.

Web90-FOSDEM2014-PreformaResearchers-Discussing_DSC_0096

Researchers and practitioners from the PREFORMA project discussing challenges for memory institutions related to implementation of file formats at FOSDEM.

A step ahead in the process of Open Dialogue that PREFORMA is fostering between the memory institutions and the technology providers who develop the software, that will lead to the definition of the requirements of the PREFORMA tender.

For more information visit www.preforma-project.eu.

Helsinki, 20 May 2014

E-infrastructures and services for data preservation and curation @ EGI CF 2014, Helsinki

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

In the last years, e-Infrastructures and DCH communities entered a dialogue and now several data-infrastructure projects exist, whose results can be adapted and re-used in the DCH domain. In particular, fruitful cooperation started among these projects to test the services and tools developed to facilitate the storage, access and preservation of digital data and to provide feedback for the further improvement of such services. Aim of this workshop was:

To present the common registry of services and tools which is being developed jointly by DCH-RP & APARSEN and to discuss how to sustain it after the end of the project. The registry will contain descriptions of common user scenarios as well as information about the tools that may be used to implement them. In addition it will support searching the tools database using several criteria and it will also provide assessments and reviews of most relevant tools. The aim of the registry is to help a broad range of DCH communities, institutions and projects to plan implementation of their digital preservation processes implementation and understand commonly available options by offering them the integrated information from both projects.
To present the first results of the Proof of Concepts that have been conducted in the frame of DCH-RP, where e-infrastructure providers and cultural institution work together to test services and e-infrastructures to store and manage cultural digital resources.
To present the interim version of the roadmap for the long-term preservation of digital cultural content, which aims to help policy makers and programme owners to plan ahead and assist managerial teams of cultural institutions in taking decisions related to digital preservation and to support cultural heritage institutions in defining practical action plan with a realistic time frame for its implementation.
To attract new projects and initiatives working in the domain of DCH, e-infrastructures and digital preservation to find synergies and discuss opportunities for cooperation, starting from concrete use cases.

PRESENTATIONS

Introduction to the workshop (Antonella Fresa, Promoter Srl, download PDF)
A roadmap for the preservation of digital cultural content (Borje Justrell, Riksarkivet, download PDF)
The DCH-RP registry of services (Michal Jankowski, PSNC, download PDF)
APARSEN structured list of services for digital preservation (Felix Engel, FTK, download PDF)
Keeping culture alive: participative storage and access solutions for cultural and research institutions (Hilke Arijs, KIK-IRPA, download PDF)
Sustainability of digital preservation services in the long term (Ed Fay, Open Planets Foundation, download PDF)

THE DCH-RP PROJECT

DCH-RP (www.dch-rp.eu) is a coordination action co-funded by the European Union under its Seventh Framework Programme whose outcome is a roadmap for the implementation of a preservation infrastructure for Digital Cultural heritage (DCH) which will be the first instance of an Open Science Infrastructure for DCH in 2020.
For further information visit the DCH-RP Showcase.

TARGET COMMUNITIES AND STAKEHOLDERS

Researchers in the humanities
Teaching and learning actors (schools, training centers, university courses)
Cultural and creative industry for the creative use and re-use of the digital cultural content
Content providers (e.g. big and small cultural heritage institutions – libraries, museums, archives, other National institutions -, private and public publishers, etc.).
Policy makers and programme owners
E-infrastructure providers, technology providers and R&D institutions
R&D projects and initiatives focusing on e-Infrastructures and digital preservation.

Antonella Fresa and Rosette Vandenbroucke presented the Digital Cultural Heritage use case.

Workshop on Managing, Computing and Preserving Big Data for Research

Following the December 2013 workshop “EGI towards Horizon 2020”, EGI.eu and APARSEN (the Alliance Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe Network) organised an EGI Community Workshop focusing on “Managing, computing and preserving big data for research”.

The workshop, which was held in Amsterdam from 4th until 6th of March 2014, brought together all scientific domains within the EGI community to discuss and develop requirements on e-infrastructures to foster and support the generation, analyse and usage of the research data.

during the workshop…

The workshop focused in particular on these essential questions:

How can publicly-funded institutions provide sustainable infrastructures to manage, preserve, analyze and give access to large research data?
How can generic services be developed on heterogeneous and complex datasets and diverse formats cutting across a wide-range of scientific communities?
Which business models can be developed and deployed to provide sustainable preservation and re-use?
What are the challenges and needs being faced for managing open data?

The outcomes will help EGI in evolving its technical services to support new requirements.

APARSEN provideed technical support and consultancy during the workshop.

Antonella Fresa from Promoter Srl and Rosette Vandenbroucke from BELSPO represented the DCH-RP project and more in general the Digital Cultural Heritage community and use cases. Click here to download the presentation which was delivered.

Here are some photos from the workshop in Amsterdam

[Show as slideshow]

For more information:
https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2052

January 2014 edition of the Pre‑Commercial Procurement newsletter issued by the European Commission

ICT-PCP Newsletter – January 2014

First Horizon 2020 funding for innovation procurement available now

December 2013 the European Commission adopted the 2014-2020 research and innovation funding program Horizon 2020 that makes available €140 Million in 2014-2015 to support procurers from around Europe to cooperate on innovation procurement in areas such as Health, Food, Energy, Transport, Climate Change, ICT & Research Infrastructures.

Innovation procurement in Horizon 2020 encompasses Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) and Public Procurement of Innovative solutions (PPI) that focus on development respectively deployment of innovative solutions. Calls are open for:

Coordination and support actions: 100% EU funding for the coordination and networking costs to cooperate on identifying opportunities and preparing for future PCPs / PPIs
PCP or PPI Cofund actions: 70% respectively 20% EU funding for the costs – including the PCP or PPI procurement cost itself – to prepare and undertake a PCP or PPI procurement

23 January 2014 info and networking day in Brussels: following presentations and participants list are uploaded here:

More info in following sections of the ICT Work Program:

ICT-35(f): €1M call for CSAs for procurers interested to prepare future PCPs/PPIs (call deadline: 23 April 2014)
ICT-36: €4M call for PCP Cofund actions for procurers interested to do a PCP (call deadline: 14 April 2015)

PCP or PPI cofund actions can be preceded by CSA actions.

Presentations of potential proposal ideas made by participants at the info day

For people that were unable to attend the info day, the videotape of the entire day will be posted here as well shortly.

All official Horizon 2020 documents are published here, including the work programs detailing all the calls and the Horizon 2020 work program Annex detailing the funding modalities (in particular D & E for PCP and PPI).

Go to the Horizon 2020 Participant Portal to get all info about the calls and start drafting and submitting your proposal.

Upcoming Events – Finding partners for PCP and PPI calls

Upcoming workshop with Smart Specialisation Platform – Thessaloniki (end March – beginning April 2014)

Online networking with other procurers

Join the EU procurement forum and the linkedin group on innovation procurement.
Contacts of procurers that participated in past PCP-PPI events on the events page of the PCP website

Interested to have a look at / get touch with on-going EU funded PCP projects

Info about PCP projects in the ICT domain funded by DG CONNECT can be found on the EU funded projects page of the PCP website. Overview presentation of all ongoing PCP and PPI related projects funded by DG CONNECT here.

News from EU funded PCP and PPI projects

New projects started (more info on the EU funded projects page of the PCP website):

UNWIRED HEALTH started 1 January 2014 that plans to undertake a PCP to establish a mobile care path for patient centric care for vaccination and heart failure cases.
NYMPHA-MD started 1 January 2014 that plans to undertake a PCP on mental care for bipolar disorders.
PREFORMA started 1 January 2014 that plans to undertake a PCP on long term digital preservation.
P4ITS started 1 December 2013. P4ITS is a coordination and support action that networks public procurers that plan to shortly embark on PPI of ITS solutions (Intelligent Transport Systems).

Interested suppliers are invited to participate in the online market consultation (closes 28 Feb 2014) for the THALEA PCP that focuses on a highly interoperable telemedicine-platform for detection of Intensive Care Unit-patients at increased risk.

On 4 April 2014, PREFORMA organizes a market consultation with potentially interested suppliers in preparation of the PREFORMA PCP on long term digital preservation.

The SCAPE Project has launched a new web based consultation and is seeking participants to help understand preservation events, threats and opportunities.

SCAPE Consultation: Digital preservation – what to monitor and how?

The SCAPE Project has launched a new web based consultation and is seeking participants to help understand preservation events, threats and opportunities.

The consultation on preservation monitoring has 30 short questions which should take about 10 minutes to complete: http://survey.scape-project.eu/index.php/862812/lang-en

“Anyone willing to preserve digital content will be aware of events that might constitute a relevant risk. In SCAPE we are developing tools that will allow you to detect risks before they cause any irreversible damage,” explains Luis Faria who is leading the consultation.

“We are looking for digital content owners to participate in our online consultation and help us develop tools that would help you to automatically detect problems with your own content, and events that might put it at risk.”

The SCAPE project is developing scalable services for planning and execution of institutional preservation strategies on an open source platform that orchestrates semi-automated workflows for large-scale, heterogeneous collections of complex digital objects. SCAPE will enhance the state of the art of digital preservation in three ways: by developing infrastructure and tools for scalable preservation actions; by providing a framework for automated, quality-assured preservation workflows and by integrating these components with a policy-based preservation planning and watch system. These concrete project results will be validated within three large-scale Test beds from diverse application areas.

Be part of the project and participate now! http://survey.scape-project.eu/index.php/862812/lang-en

January, the gateway to a new year

EUDAT News bullettin – January 2014

January brings with it lots of new activities from EUDAT including the open Call for Collaboration Projects offering free resources and expertise to pilot collaboration projects as part of its Collaborative Data Infrastructure. Research communities, projects and individual researchers are invited to make use of its data services and should apply before 26th February 2014.

Part of the data services referred to in this call are B2SHARE a web-based service for storing and sharing small research data sets, and B2FIND a simple and user-friendly portal to find research data collections stored in EUDAT data centres and other repositories. B2FIND harvests metadata from diverse sources, maps it, and makes it publically available through its cross-disciplinary catalogue. These two services are now fully deployed. Have a look by yourself! More details on EUDAT’s current and future service development and deployment are included in the service Roadmap.

The EUDAT Working groups set up in September 2013 and composed of international experts working together with EUDAT representatives, continue to investigate and discuss potential service solutions in the field of Dynamic Data, Workflows and Semantic Annotation together with an expert group focusing on Data Access and Re-Use Policies (DARUP). As a direct result of EUDAT’s Semantic Annotation Working group, the European Ontology Network (EUON) is being set up to respond to communities’ need to share and coordinate expertise and experience in the European ontology community. EUON will use the B2SHARE service to store and share data.

A fundamental concept and principle behind all of EUDAT’s activities is that Trust is key for data infrastructures and has recently published a position statement on the Value of Data and Trust. It outlines how trusted relations between various actors must be established and context-sensitive trust measures need to be put in place as they are indispensable for the global market of knowledge exchange. One such measure is data management. EUDAT aim to provide a solution that will be affordable, trustworthy, robust, persistent, open and easy to use as outlined in its current position note on open access, open data and data management planning.

Where can you meet us?

There will be many opportunities to engage with EUDAT during the coming months, through the Call for Collaboration Projects or via more informal interactions at different events. View a complete list of events at Meet Us @ and EUDAT Training plans.

For all this and more check out the new look EUDAT web site at www.eudat.eu

On 9th January 2014 a Memorandum of Understanding has been signed between the two projects

MoU between DCH-RP and ARIADNE

ARIADNE (Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe, see the web site http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/), was launched in January 2013 and is financed by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme.

ARIADNE brings together and integrates existing archaeological research data infrastructures so that researchers can use the various distributed datasets and new and powerful technologies as an integral component of the archaeological research methodology.

ARIADNE is enabling trans-national access of researchers to data centres, tools and guidance, and the creation of new Web-based services based on common interfaces to data repositories, availability of reference datasets and usage of innovative technologies. The project will contribute to the creation of a new community of researchers ready to exploit the contribution of Information Technology and to incorporate it in the body of established archaeological research methodology.

Aim of the agreement between ARIADNE and DCH-RP is to promote and support scientific collaboration between the Archaeological research Infrastructures and DCH-RP partners in order to share knowledge in the sector of digital preservation of DCH and to cooperate to the dissemination of the projects’ results.

ARIADNE and DCH-RP will carry out, in cooperation, a Proof of Concept to demonstrate how e-infrastructure can be support the preservation of digital cultural heritage.

Girona, 13-15 October

II Annual Conference of the International Council on Archives

Martin Berendse, President of the International Council on Archives (ICA), warmly invites you to ICA’s 2^nd Annual Conference 2014, being held in Girona on 13-15 October. It is also the 9^th European Conference on Archives and the 13^th Image and Research Seminar and ICA is delighted to be partnering with these respected major Audio-visual and European Archival events to deliver a professional programme addressing such a fascinating topic.

The ICA 2014 Annual Conference Joint Programme Committee is seeking presentations on the following themes:

Cultural and creative industries, and strategies of collaboration with archives
Actions and initiatives
Archives and web portals
Access to information
Digital repositories and authenticity preservation in the Cloud
Open data projects
Business models for digital preservation and custody
175^th Anniversary of Photography

Deadline for proposals: 28th February 2014
Acceptance of proposals: 30th April 2014
Deadline for texts submission (web): 1st September 2014

Further information about how to register and give your presentation is available on the official Annual Conference 2014 website:

View the event published on digitalmeetsculture.net

RICHES on Twitter! #richesEU

Frascati (Rome), 4-6 November 2013

PV 2013 Conference

Pv2013 Objectives

Standards for Archives and Interoperability enabling new added value services

“Ensuring Long-Term Preservation and Adding Value to Scientific and Technical Data” – PV 2013 – welcomes you to its seventh edition. Previous events were held at CNES in Toulouse (PV2002), at ESA-ESRIN in Frascati (PV 2004), at DCC in Edinburgh (PV2005), at DLR in Oberpfaffenhofen (PV2007), at ESA-ESAC in Madrid (PV2009) and then again at CNES in Toulouse (PV2011). For its seventh edition, the conference series is back to ESA-ESRIN in Frascati to continue addressing prospects in the domain of scientific and technical data preservation together with value adding to these data.

Scientific data access, comprehension and interoperability is vital to tackle the challenges the scientific community is facing. As an example, certain environmental analysis, like those supporting the long-term climate change variables measurement, requires historical data records to be periodically reprocessed to conform to the latest revisions of scientific understanding and modelling techniques. This in turn requires access to and understanding of the original processing, including scientific papers, algorithm documentation, processing sources code, calibration tables, databases and ancillary datasets.

Proper data management, data description and data curation remain the challenges for building modern archives while keeping in mind their long-term preservation. Coupled with flexible and open software architecture, these are the basis to allow interoperability amongst archives while enabling the development of new added value services and applications on top of existing data, ensuring its higher utilization by end (and new) users.

There will be 4 Sessions focused on these following themes:

Session 1: Ensuring long-term data and knowledge preservation;

Session 2: Adding value to data and facilitation of data use;

Session 3: Data preservation lessons learnt;

Session 4: Future prospects and cooperation.

The DCH-RP project will attend the conference by exposing its poster in the PV2013 poster session.