Digital Preservation – Ixa Group. Language Technology. https://www.ehu.eus/ehusfera/ixa News from the Ixa Group in the University of the Basque Country Wed, 03 Dec 2014 15:16:29 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.6.4 Ixa Group at the kick-off meeting of the LoCloud project https://www.ehu.eus/ehusfera/ixa/2013/03/27/ixa-locloud-kickoff/ https://www.ehu.eus/ehusfera/ixa/2013/03/27/ixa-locloud-kickoff/#comments Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:01:49 +0000 http://www.ehu.eus/ehusfera/ixa/?p=1553 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 [...]]]> 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.

Locloud_logoContent 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)

]]> https://www.ehu.eus/ehusfera/ixa/2013/03/27/ixa-locloud-kickoff/feed/ 1 A new European Project: PATHS https://www.ehu.eus/ehusfera/ixa/2011/02/04/paths_project/ https://www.ehu.eus/ehusfera/ixa/2011/02/04/paths_project/#comments Fri, 04 Feb 2011 13:42:28 +0000 http://www.ehu.eus/ehusfera/ixa/?p=184

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 [...]]]>

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.

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