Digital meets Culture

7 – 9 September 2011

I-SEMANTICS 7th International Conference on Semantic Systems. Messecongress Graz, Austria

With more than 400 participants every year I-SEMANTICS is one of the largest conferences in Europe in the field of semantic systems and the Semantic Web. It is held concurrently with the I-KNOW Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies. The combination represents a unique approach bridging the gap between highly affiliated communities and complementary research fields.

Conference website

27.07.-29.07.2011

3rd Consortium Meeting Berlin

The 3rd Consortium Meeting which took place in Berlin was organized by Institute for Museum Research, State Museums of Berlin and Museumsmedien.

In Berlin the first results for the first release, as well as our dissemination material was presented. Based on the first results the next steps for our technical development were planned. Further the requirements for our periodic report to the commission were presented.

31.03.-01.04.2011

2nd Consortium Meeting Pisa, Italy

The second HarmoSearch meeting took place in the Tuscan city of Pisa. Pisa is home of the partner company CPR, one of the research partner in the HarmoSearch project.

In Pisa the architecture for HarmoSearch as well as first samples of our dissemination material were presented. Based on the architecture we developed a work plan for our first release. It is planned to have first results at the following consortium meeting.

26.-28.01.2011

Enter 2011 Conference on Information Technology and Travel & Tourism, Innsbruck, Austria

ENTER2011@Innsbruck, the 18th ENTER eTourism Conference will bring together international experts in all aspects of Information and Communication Technologies in Travel and Tourism – the technologies which are changing the world of tourism and hospitality.

Organized by the International Federation for Information Technology and Travel & Tourism (IFITT), in 2011 ENTER will be back again to the city of Innsbruck, Austria and will be hosted at Congress und Messe Innsbruck GmbH, str. Rennweg 3, Innsbruck (Austria) from 26th to 28th January 2011. ENTER2011@Innsbruck is promising a fantastic environment for serious debate and great social interaction.

Conference program

December 6th - 7th 2010

Kick-off Meeting Vienna

The HarmoSearch project started in december with the kick-off meetig. It took place in the pre-Christmas decorated Vienna in the office of xpluso Business Solutions GmbH

At the meeting were all the work items discussed and a timetable decided.

Designed and launched by Chasen, it is a futuristic truck equipped with the most advanced digital technologies

Mobile Digital Museum – the frontier for cultural heritage exhibitions

Article and photos courtesy of Chasen Sino-Sin

The Mobile Digital Museum was designed and built for the Inner Mongolia Museum by a joint collaboration between Chasen and Amber Digital Solutions. It was kicked off in late December 2012 and completed and handed over to the museum 17 May 2013. The mobile digital museum was entirely custom made both the exterior and interior to cater to our digital requirements. It measures 13m in length and 2.5m wide. However, on the push of a button, the museum space can be expanded to 5.3m wide creating a space of 45m². A central computerized system was designed to control all the advanced interactive screens and contents of the museum. It is by far the biggest and most versatile mobile museum in China.

The Mobile Digital Museum was opened to the public on 18 May 2013 to commemorate World Museum Day. It was widely reported in the news as this is the first of a kind mobile museum in China. It is believed that it is also the world first where no authentic physical artifacts are exhibited but only high resolution 3D models of them are presented.

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The Mobile Digital Museum was started because museums are faced with 3 main problems. First is the inaccessibility to physical museums, second, the lack of connection between the visitor with the artifacts and third the safety of physical relics during travelling exhibitions.

On the problem of inaccessibility to physical museums, because most of our museums are physically located in the city centre, visiting them becomes both a time-consuming and expensive activity for people living in the outskirts of the city. This conflicts with the museums’ mission of transferring knowledge, empowering and inspiring all people to embrace and respect a country’s diverse heritage.

Museums are not only places for storage of cultural objects, they also serve as knowledge centers. However, much of their information is inaccessible to visitors. Our museums have been traditionally too focused on presenting and preserving objects (such as specimens or artworks), rather than on directly educating visitors. Typical charts, information tags for artifacts provide very limited details, creating barriers for laymen visitors to learn about an artifact, and to find its relevance to other artifacts or to themselves.

Although museums have engaged the use of verbal and visual aids such as brochures and audio guides, their effects are very limited and fail to allow visitors the means to explore artifacts more thoroughly as they tour an exhibition. Visitors often have go with queries unanswered or pass through an exhibition without being engaged. Due to the fact that every visitor is peculiar in interest and preferences, it is difficult to develop an all rounded platform that provides all relevant information, histories and stories or other content that each visitor would like.

A mobile digital museum curbs the above issues by offering:

Mobility – By traveling to remote areas, schools and underprivileged communities, our mobile digital museum aim to share the diverse aspects of the country’s culture and show the people of different ages and social status that they play a significant role in contributing to its richness and diversity

Connection – To bridge the gap between artifact information and visitor engagement, an interactive digital platform is essential for increasing engagement through resonant, rich, and interactive experiences. Our digital relics provide a platform for interactivity and access to an unlimited amount of information, presentation of rich media, and flexibility for customized experiences both inside the museum and beyond.

Interaction – Our mobile digital museum provides more options for visitors such as different ways to view collections, interactive games, quizzes to increase knowledge, themed our exhibitions and even surveys, resulting in many more opportunities for visitors to find connections to artifacts.

Empowering Visitors – By providing an interactive platform, visitors can decide on their own as to how they want to learn about the artifacts and to explore exhibitions and related content. By placing the visitors in the driving seat can help visitors discover their own connections to the exhibitions.

Unlimited Content – Our mobile digital museum can present to visitors many options for engaging with the collections. Information in the form of text, audio, video clips and animation can now be provided on one single platform. Our interactive platform allows visitors to manipulate the digital artifact freely, view them in any angle and zoom in to view details. Visitors can now interact with the artifacts and explore beyond basic facts about works in as much breadth or depth as they choose. They can even now “hold” the valuable artifacts in their palms and keep a screen capture for remembrance. This is not possible with physical relics.

Safety – Unlike the traditional mobile museums where physical relics must be carried along, a mobile digital museum carries digital artifacts. Safety and security of the relics are reduced to a minimum.

Exploration, Navigation and Retrieval of Information in Cultural Heritage

ENRICH 2013 Workshop

In the framework of SIGIR conference, ENRICH workshop will be hosted in the Long Room Hub, at the Digital Arts and Humanities Research Institute of Trinity College Dublin, on August 1st 2013.

ENRICH is supported by EU projects CULTURA and Paths, to discuss topics of interest related, but not limited to, the following areas:

Multilingual semantic search
Context-aware and semantic recommender systems
Adaptation engines and algorithms for personalised multilingual IR
User modeling and adaptation (e.g. creation and exploitation of individual or stereotypical user profiles)
Content personalisation and personalised result presentation (e.g. beyond the ranked list)
Domain modeling
External knowledge resources for IR (e.g. ontologies)
Evaluation methodologies and metrics for personalised multilingual IR
Information Extraction, Data Mining and Natural Language Processing
Social Network Analysis

Official website of the event: http://www.cultura-strep.eu/events/enrich-2013/call-for-papers

Call for papers is open until 9th June.

Organizers:

Prof. Séamus Lawless (School of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
Prof. Maristella Agosti (Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Italy)
Dr. Paul Clough (Information School, University of Sheffield, UK)
Prof. Owen Conlan (School of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)

Adobe Connect Virtual Room, 15 May 2013

The Catania Science Gateway Framework – EGI/CHAIN-REDS/eI4Africa Webinar

The general architecture of the Catania Science Gateway Framework and some of its implementations are the subjects of this webinar which is jointly organised and supported by CHAIN-REDS, eI4Africa and EGI-InSpire projects.

At the webinar attended more than 30 international experts worldwide.

The recording of the webinar on the Catania Science Gateway Framework is available at http://connect.ct.infn.it/p6b7rdr32sg/

Wanna get more web-based training on the development of Catania Science Gateways ? Fill the doodle at http://doodle.com/2khyhb383i65bru

Executive Summary:

One of the main obstacles for non-IT-expert users to exploit e-Infrastructures, such as Grids, is the fact that they are based on complex security mechanisms such as Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) and accessed through low level (command-line based, i.e. non-graphical) user interfaces.
The approach described in this webinar to tackle both this problem and make e-Infrastructured easlily and ubiquitously accessible to the largest possible number of users (including the “citizen scientist”), was to deploy them into a “Science Gateway” whose access is regulated by “Identity Federations”.
In the recent past, interesting developments have actually been independently carried out by the Grid community with the Science Gateways and by the National Research and Education Networks with the Identity Federations to ease, from one side, the access and use of Grid infrastructures and, from the other side, to increase the number of users authorised to access network-based services.
A Science Gateway is a “community-developed set of tools, applications, and data that is integrated via a portal or a suite of applications, usually in a graphical user interface, that is further customized to meet the needs of a specific community (US Teragrid/XSEDE project).”
An Identity Federation is made of “[…] the agreements, standards, and technologies that make identity and entitlements portable across autonomous domains (Burton Group)”. Identity Federations have the aim of setting up and supporting a common framework for different organisations to manage accesses to on-line resources. They are already established in many countries and currently gather a number of people which is in the order of O(10⁷).
To make e-Infrastructures easy to use and more accessible, the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Consorzio COMETA are developing since more than two years the Catania Science Gateway Framewok to create a new type of Science Gateways that implement an authentication schema based on Identity Federations.
The general architecture of the Catania Science Gateway Framework and some of its implementations are the subjects ot this webinar which is jointly organised and supported by CHAIN-REDS, eI4Africa andEGI-InSpire projects.

Interested people are invited to register following the link which appears on the event home page:

http://agenda.ct.infn.it/event/catania-sg-webinar

Where the timetable is also already available.

Dr. Irene Pivetti (Chairmain of Only Italia) with Prof.Vito Cappellini (Florence University) (c) Promoter srl archive

The Foremost European Electronic Imaging Events in the Visual Arts

Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts (EVA) @ Florence 2013

Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts
‘The Foremost European Electronic Imaging Events in the Visual Arts’

The Electronic Information, the Visual Arts and Beyond (EVA Conferences) are a series of international interdisciplinary conferences mainly in Europe, but also elsewhere in the world, for people interested in the application of information technology to the cultural and especially the visual arts field.

The first EVA Conference was held at Imperial College, London in 1990, organized by the founders James Hemsley, Kirk Martinez and Anthony Hamber. Events have been held in Athens, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, California, Cambridge [both UK & USA], Dallas, Delhi, Edinburgh, Florence, Gifu [Japan], Glasgow, Harvard, Jerusalem, Kiev, Laval, London, Madrid, Montreal, Moscow, New York, Paris, Prague, Thessaloniki, Warsaw … .

There are now regular conferences in London (UK), Berlin (Germany), Florence (Italy), Moscow (Russia), Vienna (Austria) and other major cities.

Dr. Irene Pivetti (Chairmain of Only Italia) with Prof.Vito Cappellini (Florence University) – photo (c) Promoter srl archive

The 2013 Florence conference was opened by chairmen Vito Cappellini (Florence University) and James Hemsley (EVA conferences international) and during the opening sponsors and supporters of Italian institutions welcomed the participants.

Session 1 about strategic issues with chairman Paolo Blasi (Florence University) was extremely interesting by discussing projects related to digital archives technologies, 3D technologies for museums, and futuristic projects for access and dissemination of culture and art supported by technology. Among the speakers, dr. Takayuki Morioka from Hitachi, prof. Shinji Shimojo from Osaka University, dr. Andreas Bienert from National Museum in Berlin.

Dr. Antonio Davide Madonna (ICCU) – photo by Leonardo Bianchi

Session 2, moderated by chairman Franco Niccolucci, gave an overview of EC projects and related networks and initiatives. Among the speakers, dr. Valentina Bachi, Andrea de Polo and Antonio Davide Madonna for EuropeanaPhotography, dr. Christine Schoene from Technische Universitat of Dresden, Professor Jurgen Siek from University of Applied Sciences in Berlin; also CENDARI and MARCOPOLO projects were presented.

On day 2, an international forum in the morning about culture and technology was followed by afternoon sessions to discuss about 2D-3D technologies and applications, virtual galleries, museums and related initiatives, access to the culture information.

In this event the users, suppliers and scientific research communities have the possibility to meet and exchange experiences, ideas and plans in the wide area of Culture & Technology. The event was supported by a series of workshops on international cooperation, innovation and enterprises, creative industries and cultural tourism.

EVA Florence 2013 official website: http://www.evaflorence.it/

Download the full programme here

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It will allow users to consult all collections at once with the use of keywords in their own language.

Europeana Photography multilingual vocabulary, released and disseminated

According to the plans of the project, the EuropeanaPhotography multilingual vocabulary was timely released and it starts now to be disseminated in the community of digitization and Europeana-feeder projects.

The vocabulary defined within EuropeanaPhotography is a key element of the semantic enrichment of the partners’ metadata. While not strictly necessary for the digitization of photography or delivery to Europeana, this vocabulary ensures that themes can be traced throughout the different collections. It provides translations for the keywords associated with photographic subjects and techniques, and allows better and more complete search results when searching Europeana for photographic content, providing a tool for research for multiple interested parties.

The vocabulary has been completed in no less than 12 languages – English (as the pivotal language), French, Dutch, German, Italian, Polish, Danish, Bulgarian, Slovak, Lithuanian, Catalan and Spanish – and consists of over 500 concepts in three facets –photographic technique, photographic practice and keywords – that are structured in a multifaceted, hierarchical way.

The vocabulary will be used in the annotation, translation and semantically enrichment process taking place at the time of mapping local source metadata schema’s to the LIDO metadata schema used for the EuropeanaPhotography project. It will allow users to consult all collections at once with the use of keywords in their own language, and will unify the content from the different partners among thematic lines.

Discussions are on-going with other projects, in particular Linked Heritage, for improvement and further development of the EuropeanaPhotography Vocabulary, that can be a starting point for other valuable multilingual tools to enrich digitization activities (both for photography and for other cultural heritage).

In particular, Linked Heritage is developing a Terminology Management Platform (TMP) that will build a network of multilingual cross-domain thesauri and controlled vocabularies in a collaborative way. It is under discussion the integration of the TMP with EuropeanaPhotography Vocabulary.

During a very interesting seminar organized by Linked Heritage project, focused on Multilingualism and Terminology, Nacha Van Steen from KMKG was invited to publicly talk about the vocabulary (presentation here).