Digital Libraries – Ixa Group. Language Technology.

Ixa Group at the kick-off meeting of the LoCloud project

Kepa Sarasola — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:01:49 +0000

Ixa Group is one of the 32 partners in the consortium of the LoCloud (Local content in a Europeana cloud) Project that was presented on 19-20 March, at the National Archives of Norway in Oslo. The meeting gathered 32 partners from 28 different countries to present, plan and discuss the activities of the project over the next three years.

Content from small and medium local institutions such as museums, archives and libraries is still underrepresented in the digital European arena. Cloud-based technology could offer an affordable and user-friendly solution for making their content available on-line.

LoCloud aims to develop cloud-based technology and services to help small and medium local institutions to aggregate their digital resources and make them accessible on-line, via Europeana.eu, the European Library, Museum and Archive.

The project will explore the potential of a cloud-based technology infrastructure for aggregating local content. It will also develop a number of micro-services offering geo-location and metadata enrichment, multilingual vocabularies for local history and archaeology, a historical place name gazetteer and a Wikimedia application to handling relevant ‘crowd-sourced’ content.

As a result of the LoCloud’s activities, access to over 4 million items of digital content will be made available through Europeana.

LoCloud relies on a large group of technical partners, content providers, aggregating services and partners with specific expertise which make together a very strong consortium. Gunnar Urtegård, from National Archives of Norway, project coordinator, underlined during the meetings close: “If we can keep it simple for content providers, keep simple for users and remove all the complexity in-between, then this project has the potential to be a great success.”

Europeana.eu provides access to the digitized content of Europe’s galleries, libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections. It currently includes over 26 million books, photographs, paintings, films, sound recordings and archival resources from more than 2,200 institutions in every European member state. More information can be found at http://www.europeana.eu/portal/.

LoCloud is one of a suite of projects, funded by the European Commission, to develop Europeana and enhance its contents. It will explore the potential of cloud computing technologies for Europeana, with a focus on small and medium sized institutions. It aims to support them in making their content and metadata available to Europeana.eu. To this purpose a set of services and tools will be developed to help to reduce technical, semantic and skills barriers and to enhance Europeana. See an older entry in this blog that describes Paths, a previous project related with this subject.

LoCloud aims to build on the achievements of two earlier Best Practice Network projects: CARARE, in establishing a repository-based aggregator for Archaeological and Architectural heritage; and Europeana Local, in its work with local institutions and their regional and national aggregators, which has resulted in the contribution to date of well over 5 million items to Europeana.

The LoCloud web site will go live at the end of April at: www.locloud.eu.

LoCloud is co-funded by the European Commission’s ICT Policy Support Programme.

Contact: Aitor Soroa (a.soroa (at) ehu.es)

Supporting Users’ Exploration of Digital Libraries (SUEDL workshop)

Kepa Sarasola — Sun, 27 May 2012 07:42:58 +0000

Eneko Agirre and Arantxa Otegi from the Ixa Group are members of the organizing committee in this workshop:

International Workshop on Supporting Users’ Exploration of Digital Libraries,
to be held as part of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL).
Cyprus, September 27, 2012

The aim of the workshop is to stimulate collaboration from experts and stakeholders in Digital Libraries, Cultural Heritage, Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval in order to explore methods and strategies to support exploration of Digital Libraries, beyond the white box paradigm of search and click.

Important dates

Research paper submission: July 5, 2012
Notification of acceptance: July 27, 2012
Camera ready version: September 10, 2012
Workshop day: September 27, 2012

A new European Project: PATHS

Kepa Sarasola — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 13:42:28 +0000

IXA Group is participating with other 5 partners in a new European project: PATHS (2010-2012).
The PATHS project (Personalised Access To cultural Heritage Spaces) primarily addresses objective ICT-2009.4.1: Digital Libraries and Digital Preservation. It relates to target outcome (d), adaptive cultural experiences, by creating personalised views of various forms of cultural expression, adapting these views to the background and cognitive context of the user and offering meaningful guidance about the interpretation of cultural works. PATHS will make important progress in this direction.

Europeana: Significant amounts of cultural heritage material are now available through online digital library portals. However, this vast amount of cultural heritage material can also be overwhelming for many users who are provided with little or no guidance on how to find and interpret this information.

The PATHS project will create a system that acts as an interactive personalised tour guide through existing digital library collections. The system will offer suggestions about items to look at and assist in their interpretation. Navigation will be based around the metaphor of a path through the collection. A path can be based around any theme, for example artist and media (“paintings by Picasso”), historic periods (“the Cold War”), places (“Venice”) and famous people (“Muhammad Ali”). Users will be able to construct their own paths or follow pre-defined ones.

The PATHS project will provide users with innovative ways to access and utilise the contents of digital libraries that enrich their experiences of these resources. This will be achieved by extending the state-of-the-art in user-driven information access and by applying language technologies to analyse and enrich online content. The project will take a user-centred approach to development to accommodate the needs, interests and preferences of different types of users.

These goals shall be realised through the following objectives :

Analysis of users’ requirements for access to Cultural Heritage collections
Organisation and enrichment of Cultural Heritage content for use within a navigation system
Implementation of a system for navigating Cultural Heritage resources
Techniques for providing personalised access to Cultural Heritage content
Porting the navigation system for use on mobile devices and Facebook
Evaluation with user groups and in field trials

Therefore, the project will research on the following areas:

Information Access: The project will develop a user-driven navigation through collections of information, gathering the users’ requirements and modeling it.
Educational Informatics: Adapting to individual learners in relation to being directed and being allowed the freedom to explore autonomously.
Content interpretation and enrichment: Representation and sharing of information about items, and identifying background information related to the items in cultural heritage collections

IXA Group will work mainly in content processing and enrichment. This means that content from Cultural Heritage sources will processed to a multi-layered network and augmented with additional information that will enrich the user’s experience. The additional information will include links between items in the collection and to external sources like Wikipedia or other relevant collections. The resulting multi-layered network will form the basis for the paths used to navigate the collection.

The PATHS consortium contains six partners.

Two academic institutions:
- University of Sheffield (USFD), UK (Coordinator).
- Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU ), Basque Country
Two SMEs:
- i-sieve Technologies Ltd . Greece.
- Asplan Viak Internet (Avinet), Norway.
Two cultural heritage enterprises
- MDR Partners , UK (Project Management).
- Alinari 24 Ore Spa , Italy

IXA NLP has been invited to join Europeana v1.0 thematic network

Kepa Sarasola — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 23:09:47 +0000

Europeana.eu (http://europeana.eu/) is a place for inspiration and ideas. There you can search through the cultural collections of Europe, connect to other user pathways and share your discoveries. Europeana.eu is funded by the European Commission and the member states. It links you to 6 million digital items.

* Images – paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects
* Texts – books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers
* Sounds – music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts
* Videos – films, newsreels and TV broadcasts

Some of these are world famous, others are hidden treasures from Europe’s

* museums and galleries
* archives
* libraries
* audio-visual collections

Europeana version 1.0 (http://version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-project/home) is a 2.5 year project that will bring the Europeana.eu prototype to full service. In 2010 this project will implement a new version of Europeana with added functionality and access to over 10 million digital objects.

This project is the successor network to the EDLnet thematic network which created the EDL Foundation and the Europeana prototype. Following the launch of the user designed and driven prototype of Europeana the EDL Foundation wishes to use Europeana v1.0 to develop an operational service and solve key operational issues related to the implementation and functioning of the Europeana. Stakeholders, including the general public when the full operational service is offered, will be involved in Europeana and informed how they can contribute and access content. The work of Europeana v1.0 will include the development and implementation of all the necessary processes to create and run such an operation and a full scale business development operation to ensure a steady stream of content is made available. Additionally dissemination efforts to end users will be executed to ensure take up and continuous involvement of end users in order to achieve sustainability of such a service. Among the tools to enlarge user involvement will be the development of generic (web)services that allow others to re-use and re-purpose the data. Key infrastructure components and value-added services will be implemented by the Europeana Connect BPN. Content will come from existing sources such as The European Library and from the linked Europeana Travel, MIMO and Judaica proposals, as well the results of current eContentPlus projects: Athena, EFG and Europeana Local.

version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-project/universities/