Access to and preservation of cultural heritage - Cordis - Europa EU

Access to and preservation of cultural heritage 25 European research projects

May 2008

DigiCult The European Union is funding research that explores leading-edge information and communication technologies for accessing, experiencing and preserving cultural and scientific resources. This programme (DigiCult, for short) is managed by the European Commission's unit 'Cultural heritage and technology enhanced learning'. The unit also supports research on how the use of ICTs can help make learning more efficient (technology-enhanced learning programme). 'Cultural heritage and technology enhanced learning' is part of the Directorate-General 'Information Society and Media', and one of the units of the Directorate 'Digital Content & Cognitive Systems' (Luxembourg).

For more information: Website: http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/telearn-digicult/ Mailbox: [email protected]

Access to and preservation of cultural and scientific resources

Short descriptions of 25 research projects funded under the Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP6)

Last update: May 2008

CONTENT Introduction .................................................................................................... 4

1) Call 1 and call 3 projects Digital Libraries BRICKS ................................................................................................................6 DELOS ..................................................................................................................7 Audio-visual and Film Preservation PRESTOSPACE ......................................................................................................8 (Virtual) Museums and Sites AGAMEMNON .......................................................................................................9 EPOCH................................................................................................................10 TNT-The Neanderthal Tools ...............................................................................11 Coordination and Support Actions CALIMERA ..........................................................................................................12 MINERVAplus .....................................................................................................13 TEL-ME-MOR ......................................................................................................14

2) Call 5 projects Digital Preservation CASPAR..............................................................................................................15 Planets...............................................................................................................16 DPE ....................................................................................................................17 Digital Libraries and Archives CONTRAPUNCTUS...............................................................................................18 EASAIER ............................................................................................................19 ethnoArc ............................................................................................................20 IMAGINATION....................................................................................................21 MEMORIES .........................................................................................................22 MOSAICA ...........................................................................................................23 MultiMATCH .......................................................................................................24 P2P-FUSION.......................................................................................................25 QVIZ ..................................................................................................................26 (Virtual) Museums and Sites CINeSPACE ........................................................................................................27 ISAAC ................................................................................................................28 iTACITUS............................................................................................................29 VENUS................................................................................................................30

INTRODUCTION The 6th Framework Programme for RTD The European Community's Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP6) was adopted in September 2002 by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. It had an overall budget of € 17.5 billion until end 2006. One of the seven thematic priorities was Information Society Technologies (IST), with an indicative budget of € 3.6 billion for the five year period. Based on the concept of the European Research Area, FP6 aimed at channelling support into actions and projects designed to build partnerships among Europe’s best researchers. The bulk of funding was concentrated on large-scale projects with the potential of having an integrating effect on Europe’s research landscape, resulting in a common endeavour and leveraging a critical mass of research efforts, scientific excellence, knowledge, financial resources and infrastructure. As regards the technical content, FP6 focused on specific themes that are strategically important to Europe’s future.

EU-funded research on digital cultural and scientific resources Research in the digital aims at improving the resources when these tools that support the resources.

cultural heritage domain, under FP6 part of the IST programme, meaning and experiences people get from cultural and scientific resources exist in electronic form; and to develop systems and accessibility and use over time of digital cultural and scientific

Projects resulting from the first and third IST call The first IST call for proposals in FP6 was open from 17 December 2002 until 24 April 2003 and included 'Technology-enhanced learning and access to cultural heritage' as one of its strategic objectives. After evaluation by independent experts, eight proposals were retained for funding. Six were RTD projects covering research in the field of digital libraries services (BRICKS, DELOS), the digitisation and restoration of audio-visual and film heritage (PRESTOSPACE), and research into new virtual representations or re-constructions of cultural and archaeological objects and sites (AGAMEMNON, EPOCH, TNT). Two Coordination Actions targeted community building between stakeholders, firstly between national bodies responsible for digitisation policies and programmes (MINERVAPLUS) and secondly between the different types of cultural and memory institutions at local/regional level (CALIMERA). The projects started work between December 2003 and March 2004. One project was selected from the proposals submitted to the third IST call (15 June – 22 September 2004) which included the specific objective of stimulating the participation of the new EU-Member States in IST activities. The Specific Support Action TEL-MEMOR extended the 'The European Library' (TEL) service to the national libraries of the new Member States. These nine projects are being co-funded by the EU with a total amount of approximately € 37.7 million.

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Projects resulting from the fifth IST call The fifth call for the IST priority within FP6 (18 May – 21 September 2005) included the strategic objective 'Access to and preservation of cultural and scientific resources'. From the 112 proposals submitted, 16 were retained for funding and started between April and September 2006. The financial contribution of the European Union amounts to a total of € 42 million. Two large-scale projects are testing OAIS-based systems and tools to support longerterm availability and accessibility of multi-sourced and multi-formatted resources (CASPAR) and to integrate preservation functions and services into organisational workflows and processes (Planets). The project DPE – DigitalPreservationEurope is working towards coordination of national activities in preservation, focusing on advocacy, certified repositories, and mobilising centres or networks of competence. Research projects targeting application areas such as digital libraries and archives are creating methods and tools for (semi-)automatic indexing and semantic annotation of non-textual objects (music, speech, images). At the same time, they aim at improving information and knowledge retrieval through efficient search engines and user interfaces that will be able to deliver results from complex multimedia resources, from distributed collections and across languages. Other research, more oriented towards applications in virtual museums, archaeological sites and cultural tourism, focuses on object conceptualisation and representation and will advance technologies such as simulation, rendering, AR/VR and 3D models. Underlying architectures and concepts include peer-to-peer services, location and time awareness (allied to GIS) and mobile technologies.

Project types or 'instruments' Integrated Projects are expected to assemble the necessary critical mass of activities, expertise and resources to achieve ambitious goals ('programme approach'). Typical for Specific Targeted Research Projects (STREPs) are a 'single problem approach' and more focused objectives. Networks of Excellence are designed to strengthen scientific and technological excellence on a particular research topic with the aim to foster European leadership and to overcome fragmentation of existing research capacities at long term. Co-ordination Actions aim at promoting and supporting the co-operation or networking of research and innovation projects or of stakeholder groups towards a specific objective and for a fixed period of time. Finally, Specific Support Actions contribute to the implementation of the Framework Programme, the analysis and dissemination of results, or the preparation of future activities. They may also be used to stimulate international cooperation, to encourage and facilitate the participation of SMEs, small research teams, as well as organisations from the new EU Member States.

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Digital Libraries BRICKS Building Resources for Integrated Cultural Knowledge Services

BRICKS offers cultural institutions, digital content providers, and digital collection curators a complete framework to manage, exploit and share digital resources throughout a worldwide network in a secure and cost effective manner.

The idea driving the BRICKS project was a new generation of 'digital libraries', to be read as a comprehensive term covering digital museums, digital archives and other kinds of digital memory systems. Technologically, this should be based on a 'European Digital Memory' platform; organisationally, it was supported through the 'BRICKS Community', constantly growing throughout the project's lifetime. BRICKS was an Integrated Project, structured in three main areas of work: − Infrastructure: this area addressed the enabling technology of a European Digital Memory platform, i. e. a networked system of services based on open standards that integrates heterogeneous collections of digital multimedia documents. − Application services: this area was the main focus of the project, aiming at creating the initial services of the European Digital Memory. These services present added value for the involved user communities, and demonstrate the market potential of the platform and the soundness of its infrastructure. Four main application scenarios were defined: access to culture, management of culture, creation of culture, and edition of digital texts. The applications offer a wide range of possibilities for the exploitation of digital cultural heritage, and may be used to develop integrated eCommerce solutions for cultural heritage organisations, technology providers and users. − Sustainability: Another important goal of the project was the development of a ‘Factory’ that would be self-sustaining in the future. The BRICKS Factory is a user- and service-oriented space to share knowledge and resources in the cultural heritage domain. The most advanced technologies - semantic web, web services, DRM systems, watermarking etc. - were considered in order to offer innovative and customised solutions. In order to build consensus and a critical mass, to share knowledge and services for digital content, and to exploit the results achieved, the BRICKS Community has been established. Among its members are content providers, art professionals, art researchers and students, as well as interested users in general. When using BRICKS, cultural institutions can benefit from the opportunity to take part in valueadded, trusted online constellations in which the identity, the liability and the quality of the involved actors are certified; the correctness and the legality of the e-content products are guaranteed; and the validity of licensing procedures, commercial conditions and transactions is ensured.

Project facts Project type: Start date: Duration: EU funding: Partners: Project coordinator: Contact: Project website:

Integrated Project 1 January 2004 42 months € 7 000 000 23 Engineering - Ingegneria Informatica SpA (Italy) Massimo Bertoncini, e-mail: [email protected] http://www.brickscommunity.org

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Digital Libraries DELOS A Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries

DELOS has built a European research community in the field of digital libraries, integrating research on library architectures, information access and personalisation, audio-visual and non traditional objects, user interfaces, knowledge extraction, semantic interoperability, preservation and evaluation.

The DELOS vision has been that digital libraries would become "the universal knowledge repositories and communication conduits for the future, common vehicles by which everyone will access, analyse, evaluate, enhance, and exchange all forms of information. They will be accessible at any time and from anywhere, and will offer a friendly, multi-modal, efficient, and effective interaction and exploration environment". The main effort of the DELOS Network of Excellence has been towards bridging the gap between this vision and the reality, by furthering research in many critical aspects of digital libraries and by the creation of an active European digital library research community. The DELOS community, through over 500 scientific papers, has provided significant contributions to many key components of digital libraries, such as advanced and specialised digital library architectures; automatic metadata capturing and extraction from multimedia collections; mechanisms for the integration and automation of appraisal and ingestion of digital material; ontologies for both visual and textual concepts; personalised, context-aware multilingual and multimodal information retrieval, delivery and presentation; user-friendly interfaces; annotation services; testbeds for comparative systems and system component evaluation. One of the joint activities of the DELOS network was to develop next generation digital library technologies, with the overall objective of building interoperable multimodal/multilingual services and integrated content management to be incorporated into industrial-strength digital library management systems. DelosDLMS, a globally integrated prototype and demonstrator for future digital libraries, offers various services and specialised functionalities on top of a reliable and scalable middleware infrastructure. Another important research challenge has been the interoperability of the various content holders, i.e. the ability to store and retrieve information across collections in diverse media and languages. The DELOS contribution to this domain was the development of a digital library reference model, providing a conceptual framework for the definition of the relationships among the basic concepts underlying each digital library. The achievements of the DELOS Network can be classified into four categories: − − − −

spreading excellence and disseminating research results to the interested application communities, and training young researchers in digital library related themes advancing the state of the art in a number of technologies which are crucial for the development of the next generation of digital libraries the definition of a reference model for digital libraries the development of DelosDLMS, a prototype for future digital library management systems.

Project facts

Project type: Start date: Duration: EU funding: Partners: Project coordinator: Contact: Project website:

Network of Excellence 1 January 2004 48 months € 6 000 000 57 GEIE ERCIM (France) Philippe Rohou, e-mail: [email protected] http://www.delos.info/

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Audio-visual and Film Preservation PRESTOSPACE Preservation towards Storage and Access. Standardised Practices for Audio-visual Contents in Europe

Institutions responsible for audio-visual collections face major challenges in taking on the migration to digital formats and the preservation of already digitised holdings. This Integrated Project will provide technical solutions and systems for digital preservation of all types of audio-visual collections.

A wealth of historical, cultural and commercial assets produced with the audiovisual technologies of the 20th century are today at risk of loss, due to either media deterioration or equipment obsolescence. PRESTOSPACE has developed methods and technologies to accelerate preservation and to reduce its cost. R&D work addressed issues such as digitisation, quality restoration, metadata extraction, storage, network bandwidth, secure interaction, rights management, and effective delivery systems for end-users in the commercial and non-profit sector. Starting point for the project's work was to run a user survey to collect information on European audiovisual collections, and to obtain an overview of the functional requirements for the tools and services to be developed. These were defined as: − − − −

For preservation: a fast, affordable datacine, a contactless playback tool for audio disks, automated audio and video preservation tools, a manual tape condition assessment tool and an information system for preservation management; For restoration: a restoration management tool, a defect analysis and description infrastructure, a set of high-level restoration algorithms, a disk-to-disk real-time restoration tool, a film restoration software tool; For storage and archive management: a web-guide and software tools for planning of storage, and for business-case planning for audio-visual preservation and organisation, a logistics and quality insurance system; For metadata, delivery and access: a semi-automatic description tool, an export system for delivering preservation results to medium and large archives and a turnkey system for delivering preservation results to small archives.

Technology developments under PRESTOSPACE comprise audio, film and video scanning tools, including a film scanner specifically dedicated for archive films. Documentation and publication platforms support the encoding and retrieval of audiovisual contents, and are available as a turnkey system providing a scaled down repository tailored for small archives. This technology set, the 'Preservation Factory' is designed to support both the commercial and non-profit sectors. The integrated semi-automated solution could help reducing costs significantly while maintaining archive quality, and delivering common standardised services available to any European archive owner, from small collections to the largest. Furthermore, the project has produced guidelines and services for audio, video, and film restoration to manage migration processes and storage, and it has created the basis for a European competence centre for digital preservation.

Project facts Project type: Integrated Project Start date: 1 February 2004 Duration: 48 months EU funding: € 9 000 000 Partners: 34 Project coordinator: Institut national de l’audiovisuel (France) Contact: Daniel Teruggi, e-mail: [email protected] Project website: http://prestospace.org/

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(Virtual) Museums and Sites AGAMEMNON Pictures from the Past: A Wireless Network of Magic Digital Cameras and Palmtops for Archaeological Travels through the Time

AGAMEMNON exploits 3G mobile phones equipped with embedded cameras for enhancing visits of open-air archaeological sites and museums. Visitors receive enriched and personalised information on monuments.

The increasing availability of third generation mobile phones with camera and multimedia functions opens new horizons for the development and use of innovative IT tools in archaeological sites and museums. The primary beneficiaries of the research carried out by AGAMEMNON will be the visitors to a site or museum. With the 3G phones, they will be able to take pictures of objects which they are interested in and to pass them on to a server, which then sends additional information back to the mobile phone - in form of SMS, voice comments, videos or images such as 3D reconstructions. AGAMEMNON also helps visitors to plan the circuit according to their personal interests and time available. The on-screen itinerary constantly updates as the visitor moves around the site. Technical content of the project: − Advanced image analysis of pictures taken by phones-embedded cameras in order to describe the users' attention (what they are looking at); − Personalised multimedia information delivery based on users attention and profile, leveraging on 3G services (i.e. 3D reconstruction of monuments, history movies, etc.); − Advanced user profiling, both 'statically' (i.e. through a set of questions at the beginning of the visit) and 'dynamically' (i.e. as the visit proceeds and the user interacts with the system); − Adaptive and proactive visit scheduling, including dynamically re-scheduling the visit path, based on the visitor's profile and his current location, while optimising the flow of visitors to avoid overcrowding of the most popular points (using real-time location information, coupled with statistical data); − Voice-based commands will enable users to interact with the system in various European languages; AGAMEMNON runs on the visitors' own mobile phones, so customers don't need to rent devices, or learn how to use them, and institutions don't have to invest in or maintain a stock of electronic devices. The system works over existing UMTS, GPRS and GSM networks, so institutions don't have to invest in wireless networks. The prototype of AGAMEMNON was tested in pilot sites in Paestum (Italy), and Mycenae (Greece).

Project facts

Project type: Start date: Duration: EU funding: Partners: Project coordinator: Contact: Project web site:

Specific Targeted Research Project 1 January 2004 30 months € 1 998 419 6 TXT e-solutions SpA (Italy) Eng. Matteo Villa, e-mail: [email protected] http://services.txt.it/agamemnon/

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(Virtual) Museums and Sites EPOCH Excellence in Processing Open Cultural Heritage

This Network of Excellence performed research on toolkits for cultural heritage applications. It also spread excellence through dissemination and training, studying the socio-economic impact of cultural heritage, and exploring mechanisms for ICT deployment in heritage organisations.

EPOCH had three main areas of activity. First, to foster integration within the cultural heritage sector, through activities such as technology watch and case studies that demonstrate applications of ICT within the sector. Second, to set up a joint research agenda, defining research needs and aiming to fill in missing links in the production chain. Finally, the network was committed to spreading best practices through support for events, publications and a substantial training and mobility initiative. Core technical research in EPOCH aimed at defining the architecture, components and design guidelines for a common infrastructure to support production of applications involving digital versions of tangible cultural heritage content. Surveys conducted as part of the project's work have revealed needs in the pipeline for processing heritage data. These are now being addressed by new tools (NEWTONs) developed by EPOCH: − − − − − −

3DKIOSK, covering the entire chain of steps in 3D processing AMA, providing a flexible Open Source tool support for mapping existing datasets, as archaeological excavation data and museum collections CIMAD, exploring the implementation of a framework for smart cultural heritage environments supporting distributed and mobile on-site applications, from data capture to public dissemination IMODELASER, integrating laser scanners and imaging devices UPGRADE, developing software and best practice concerning the exploration and mapping of underwater archaeological sites CHARACTERISE, creating a 'Scene Population Toolkit' to place intelligent, multilingual avatars into virtual scenes, powered by speech synthesis

The production of the EPOCH Research Agenda has been another milestone of the project. It analyses the current state and future directions of research in ICT specifically inspired by the needs of the cultural heritage sector. The discussion of research implications is structured around the business processes typically undertaken by cultural heritage professionals. These include: capture of cultural heritage data; documentation; user created content; intelligent tools; digitisation of legacy metadata; search and research, including semantic and multi-lingual processing; visualisation and presentation; specific issues for web access and dissemination; mobile, distributed and networked systems; and long term preservation and upwards compatibility. A horizontal integration perspective is present in EPOCH's centres of collaboration for providers of ICT-based services for the cultural heritage sector. They aim at better articulating their expertise and complementary competencies, needed for bringing the rich and diverse European cultural heritage into the digital age.


Network of Excellence 15 March 2004 48 months € 7 880 000 92 University of Brighton (United Kingdom) David Arnold; e-mail: [email protected] http://www.epoch.eu

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(Virtual) Museums and Sites TNT - THE NEANDERTHAL TOOLS Transforming Representational Cultural Heritage into Digital Media Popular Scientific Content and Developing a Visual Simulation Engine for Collaborative Realtime Exploration Focusing on Neanderthal collections, this project worked on the online visualisation of scientific objects and artefacts and developed a Web repository providing access to 500°000 years of cultural and sociological history in Europe.

The TNT project has worked towards building the largest collection of Neanderthal findings in Europe - in an online database. Virtual representations created with state of the art technology make the fragile and dispersed fossils and artefacts continuously accessible for scientists and other interested public, independent on their location. The main results of the TNT project are: − NESPOS: Establishing the leading scientific network on Neanderthal research This service enhances the current knowledge on human peopling and bio-cultural evolution across Europe. It facilitates joint international remote research on virtual primary sources and supports the preservation of the unique originals for future generations by making them available in digital form. − The VISICORE Suite - Virtual archaeology at work The TNT 3D visualisation and analytic applications are combined in the Visual Simulation and Collaborative Rendering Engine. The VISICORE Suite provides a tool collection that covers the whole scientific workflow from the topographics of an excavation campaign to the exploration and documentation of single findings and artefacts. Its two main components are: ArteCore, a virtual archaeology toolset with 2D and 3D visualisation routines, allowing for the examination of virtual high-resolution representations without touching and damaging the originals; GeoCore, a map-based geo information system for presenting, exploring, and editing of archaeological excavation data in real- time 3D perspective. − ArchChannel: sharing the world's archaeological knowledge The ArchChannel hosted by TNT project partner National Geographic, is a cross-media Web portal into the cultural heritage of mankind. It adapts knowledge from historical and prehistorical science and archaeological findings to an interested layman public. It also provides information on how to actively use the relevant museums and archaeological sites, and therefore has the potential to stimulate cultural tourism. It covers a wide spectrum of subjects relevant to archaeology and anthropology from the first Europeans (Homo heidelbergensis, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens sapiens) to the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Roman and Celt civilisations, the Goths and many other peoples and cultures, right through to recent archaeological times, spanning a period of over 500 000 years of cultural and sociological history in Europe.


Specific Targeted Research Project 1 March 2004 24 months € 2 650 000 8 ART+COM AG (Germany) Pavel Mayer, e-mail:[email protected] http://www.the-neanderthal-tools.org/

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Coordination and Support Actions CALIMERA Cultural Applications: Local Institutions Mediating Electronic Resource Access

Building on the achievements of the Pulman network, which had already paved the way for best practice among local institutions, CALIMERA was launched to support local cultural institutions in developing their capacity and competence to participate actively in research and innovation activities.

The objectives of the CALIMERA project were: − Ensure that local cultural institutions (public libraries, museums and archives) benefit from and contribute to the goals of the Information Society Technologies agenda set out in the 6th RTD Framework Programme Programme. − Coordinate and mobilise local cultural institutions for their new role as key players in transforming innovative technologies into helpful services for ordinary citizens, including all types of users. − Promote the position of local cultural institutions as intermediaries between technological modernisation and end-users, create and deliver access to environments for intelligent heritage and cultural tourism, identify a framework for focused research on usability. − Increase the sharing of best practice by local institutions, by producing guidelines and benchmarking tools and by preparing high-impact dissemination activities. − Participate in the extension of the European Research Area, especially by nurturing the involvement of the New Member States and the Accession Countries. The CALIMERA Co-ordination Action completed its work in May 2005. Among the key deliverables, publicly available from the project website, are: − An extensive set of guidelines for local cultural institutions on social, management and technical issues underlying digital service delivery, which have been translated into more than 30 languages. − Country reports on every country in the network. − The 'Solutions Noticeboard' providing information on individual solutions useful to local cultural institutions, emerging from the industrial and research sectors. − The 'Policy Toolkit' intended to support those who are developing policies for cross-domain partnerships. − The 'Research Roadmap' which takes an end-user and functional view of the future research needs of the CALIMERA constituency.

Project facts Project type: Co-ordination Action Start date: 1 December 2003 Duration: 18 months EU funding: € 899 933 Partners: 51 Project coordinator: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Departamento de Bibliotecas e Arquivos (Portugal) MDR Partners – Project Manager and Scientific Co-ordinator (United Kingdom) Contact: Rob Davis, e-mail: [email protected] Project website: http://www.calimera.org/default.aspx

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Coordination and Support Actions MINERVAplus Ministerial Network for Valorising Activities in Digitisation PLUS

MINERVA / MINERVAplus coordinated a network of Member States' cultural ministries in order to facilitate the adoption of the Lund action plan. Its activities were geared towards harmonising national programmes in the field of digitisation of cultural and scientific content.

MINERVA (2002-2005) was set up as a network of European ministries or cultural agencies with the purpose to discuss, correlate and harmonise national programmes and activities carried out in the field of digitisation of cultural and scientific content. In 2004, after the EU enlargement, the network was extended to MINERVAplus. The principal goals of the network were to create a common European platform for issues around digitisation, metadata, long-term accessibility and preservation, and for promoting recommendations and guidelines. Work towards this goals included activities to: − facilitate the adoption of the Lund principles and the Lund Action Plan, in EU Member States, accession countries, and other countries; − support and foster the collaboration on scientific research, encouraging joint agendas and programmes; to increase the dimension, make visible, promote and exchange information about national policy profiles concerning digitisation; − define a business model for digitisation projects, including technical guidelines and specific tools for the management of IPR and related issues; − set up dissemination and training activities at national level, acquisition of new skills and access to existing resources. − implement users' needs requirements for accessibility and usability of web sites, define training schemes and develop recommendations, make available test-beds, define mechanisms for evaluating models, methodologies, techniques and approaches; − implement the existing benchmarking framework on digitisation, able to compare and improve quality of national approaches and promote good practice across Europe and beyond. During 2004 and 2005, the MINERVAPlus project team organised a number of workshops and presentations in the member countries and continued the editorial collection of MINERVA in order to promote the results of its working groups and the activities of the National Representatives Group (NRG) on digitisation. Among the publications issued are a handbook on 'Quality principles of cultural Web sites', technical guidelines, good practises guides, a guide to legal issues (IPR and other) and the NRG progress report 2005 'Coordination digitisation in Europe'. All publications are available from the MINERVA website.


Co-ordination Action 1 February 2004 18 months € 840 000 21 Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (Italy) Rosella Caffo, e-mail: [email protected] http:// www.minervaeurope.org/

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Coordination and Support Actions TEL-ME-MOR The European Library: Modular Extensions for Mediating Online Resources

By providing the national libraries of the new Member States with the networking facilities offered by The European Library, TEL-ME-MOR helped to make their digital resources more accessible for the research community and other users.

This project supported the National Libraries of the ten new EU Member States of 2004 in becoming part of The European Library (TEL), a networked service that provides unified access to the electronic resources of many National Libraries across Europe. TEL-ME-MOR also included activities in the new Member States to raise awareness on the opportunities for participation in EUfunded IST research. The main objective of the TEL-ME-MOR support action was to increase the potential of the National Libraries in the Member States of the 2004 enlargement as actors in the knowledge society. This should be achieved through promoting their involvement in IST activities in the EU research framework programme and by ensuring better access to their resources. Specifically, the project extended the networking services offered by "The European Library" (TEL) to the National Libraries of the ten countries. "The European Library" is a portal hosted by the Conference of European National Librarians offering access to the online catalogues and collections of – today - more than 45 European National Libraries. The implementation of the TEL infrastructure was prepared through studies on the technical and organisational status of the libraries and on their user requirements. An important activity related to this goal was to further develop the localisation and multilingual capabilities of the TEL service: cross-language access options, subject systems and practices to increase interoperability were analysed, and the TEL interface and metadata levels were translated into nine new languages. Building awareness and providing an electronic information space for research partnerships was another TEL-ME-MOR activity, aiming at helping key actors in the knowledge society in the new Member States to use the opportunities of research partnerships and of a potential contribution to the shaping of research agendas. Methods used included linked websites in the languages of the new Member States, regional conferences, newsletters and a European conference in order to widen the impact of the knowledge network to other national libraries in EU, CIS and Balkan countries. By the end of the TEL-ME-MOR project in January 2007, the National Libraries of all the ten new EU Member States were members of 'The European Library' and their collections searchable through an interface in each of the national languages. The work preparing the new TEL-memberships also reinforced the partnership among the National Libraries and will contribute to future collaborations towards the goal of making Europe's cultural resources more accessible.

Project facts Project type: Specific Support Action Start date: 1 February 2005 Duration: 24 months EU funding: € 1 400 000 Partners: 16 Project coordinator: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Contact: Britta Woldering, e-mail: [email protected] Project website: http://telmemor.net/

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Digital Preservation CASPAR Cultural, Artistic and Scientific Knowledge Preservation, for Access and Retrieval

CASPAR set out to build components for a preservation infrastructure which user communities can use to share the cost of preserving their digital resources and which advances the state of the art in digital preservation.

CASPAR will build a framework of tools and infrastructure components to support the end-to-end preservation of all types of digitally encoded information and thus help producers, curators and users of digital resources share the burden of preservation. Work in CASPAR is driven by the following objectives: enhance techniques for capturing representation information and other preservation related information; design virtualisation services for preserving resources despite changes in computer hardware and software and storage systems; ensure trustworthiness of preserved data with standard features for digital rights management, authentication, and accreditation; research more sophisticated access to and use of preserved digital resources such as intuitive query and browsing mechanisms. The project is establishing an authoritative foundation methodology for digital preservation activities. Guiding principle is the application of the Open Archival Information Systems Reference Model (OAIS, ISO 14721). Further, through training and dissemination activities, CASPAR contributes to raising awareness about the critical importance of digital preservation among the relevant user-communities. This should facilitate the emergence of a more diverse offer of systems and services for preservation of digital resources. The CASPAR infrastructure components and tools should be applicable to essentially all types of digitally encoded information, whether from an archival or contemporary source. This is important because the artefacts created in the preservation process, for example for access control, will themselves require preservation, as will the CASPAR key components themselves. CASPAR brings together a consortium covering important digital holdings, representing scientific, cultural and creative expertise, together with commercial partners, and world leaders in the field of information preservation. To validate the research work, CASPAR is tested with different types of digital information, in a wide range of user communities: science, performing arts and cultural heritage. The testbeds produced will be embedded in operational systems within the CASPAR consortium, and will be easy to integrate into many other operational systems. The Preservation User Community founded by CASPAR is a worldwide network of professionals and organisations with a stake in the preservation of digital information: curators, service providers, memory institutions, researchers, and creators and users of digital resources in general.

Project facts Project type: Start date: Duration: Funding: Number of partners: Project coordinator: Contact: Project website

Integrated Project 1 April 2006 42 months € 8 800 000 17 Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, UK David Giaretta, e-mail: [email protected] www.casparpreserves.eu

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Digital Preservation Planets Preservation and Long-term Access to our Cultural and Scientific Heritage

Planets will build practical services and tools to help ensure long-term access to digital cultural and scientific resources. A special focus of the research is the management of digital information preservation in libraries and archives.

The Planets project brings together the complementary expertise of research institutes, technology vendors and leaders in the practical application of digital preservation technology and in the provision of preservation services. The project is further supported through the authority of European National Libraries and Archives having the legal responsibility and the legislative framework to safeguard and provide sustained access to digital cultural and scientific knowledge. The project team aims to deliver an end product in the form of a downloadable “click-and-install” software package that supports the administration, configuration, and deployment of preservation services and workflows. This will become available for other organisations to implement in an operational environment. The system will support a number of key preservation functions: − preservation planning services that empower organisations to define, evaluate, and execute preservation plans; − methodologies, tools and services for characterisation of digital objects that can automatically analyse digital objects to establish significant properties; − innovative preservation action tools and services, to ensure rendering of the objects and keeping available the properties identified; − a Testbed to provide a consistent and coherent evidence-base for the objective evaluation of different protocols, tools, services and preservation plans; − an Interoperability Framework to integrate seamlessly the tools and services to provide one easily managed preservation system. Integration and automation can be seen as the two prominent features of the Planets environment. The Planets Interoperability Framework will enable organisations to improve decision-making about long term preservation, ensure long-term access to their valued digital content and control the costs of preservation actions through increased automation and a scaleable infrastructure. Parallel to technology development, Planets also has a Dissemination and Take-up programme which will pave the way for widest possible adoption of the project's results in the user community and enable commercial providers to compete in the emerging market for differentiated preservation services and tools.


Integrated Project 1 June 2006 48 months € 8 600 000 16 The British Library, UK Dr Adam Farquhar, e-mail: [email protected] www.planets-project.eu

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Digital Preservation DPE DigitalPreservationEurope

DPE aims at improving coordination, cooperation and consistency of the currently scattered activities to secure preservation of digital resources.

The Coordination Action DigitalPreservationEurope set out to improve coordination, cooperation and consistency in current activities to secure effective preservation of digital materials. To this end, the project will facilitate pooling of the complementary expertise that exists across the academic research, cultural, public administration and industry sectors in Europe. More specifically, DPE’s project partners lead work to: − raise the profile of digital preservation; − promote the ability of Member States acting together to add value to digital preservation activities across Europe; − use cross-sectoral cooperation to avoid redundancy and duplication of effort; − ensure auditable and certificated standards for digital preservation processes are selected and introduced; − facilitate skills development through training packages; − enable relevant research coordination and exchange; − develop and promote a research agenda roadmap; − help both citizens and specialist professionals recognise the central role that digital preservation plays in their lives and work. Main results of work carried out during the first two years of the project: − In conjunction with the UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC) DPE released the DRAMBORA toolkit and held tutorials to support its adoption. DRAMBORA facilitates internal audit by providing repository administrators with a means to assess their capabilities, identify their weaknesses, and recognise their strengths. − The DPE Research and Industrial Exchange Programme DPEX has been launched in an attempt to overcome the limited communication and collaboration between digital preservation research groups. − In order to monitor and assess current activity in the curation of digital material, DPE has designed a Registry of Digital Repositories which will be used to store and disseminate information on the preservation policies and practices of organisations responsible for the long-term management of digital materials. − Among the DPE publications, available form the project website, are a state of the art review on international competence centres for digital curation and preservation activities and expertise; a 'Market and Technology Trends Analysis' on needs and plans of main stakeholders and technological solutions available for digital preservation; and a report on the legal framework on repository infrastructure impacting on cooperation across EU Member States.

Project facts Project type: Start date: Duration: EU funding: Number of partners: Project coordinator: Contact: Project website

Coordination Action 1 April 2006 36 months € 1 451 000 9 HATII, University of Glasgow, UK Prof. Seamus Ross, e-mail: [email protected] http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu/

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Digital Libraries and Archives CONTRAPUNCTUS Preservation and unification of new and existing Braille Music digital sources for a new access methodology

CONTRAPUNCTUS will design and develop an online library enabling visually impaired musicians to benefit fully from digital Braille music scores.

Music has always been considered a crucial opportunity for education of the blind, as well as for their social integration and employment. There are, though, a numbers of barriers inhibiting those with a visual impairment to develop their potential in this domain. Besides the fact that visually impaired musicians have to dedicate much time and efforts to memorising the score, since it is generally impossible for them to read and play at the same time, they also face problems regarding access to scores. Among those are difficulties in bidirectional written communication about Braille music (Braille scores are far less coherent with traditional notation than texts with Braille transcriptions), the high cost of production and distribution of Braille scores, and national variations in music transcription that create confusion for users and discourage interchange between libraries. CONTRAPUNCTUS tackles these barriers by developing: − a standardised Braille music XML description in order to convert digital scores that currently exist in many different formats. This is to ensure compatibility of files and to enable libraries and users to share music scores. − an integrated software package, called 'Resonare', capable of reading and interpreting Braille music scores, to enhance bidirectional communication between blind and sighted persons. − an interactive Braille music XML reader for accessing digitised music by using vocal, sound and tactile information that supports the user in reading and manipulating scores according to their personal specific needs (beginner, blind music teacher, amateur, etc.). Finally, CONTRAPUNCTUS will create an online portal as access point to a Braille score library, compiling files from the most important European libraries for the blind. The project's work will contribute to reducing time and cost of production and distribution of Braille music scores. Another potential of CONTRAPUNCTUS is to increase the number of users by facilitating access to scores and to encourage music literacy in general.

Project facts Project type: Start date: Duration: Funding: Number of partners: Project coordinator: Contact: Project website:

STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project) 1 June 2006 36 months € 1 378 000 13 Biblioteca Italiana per i Ciechi 'Regina Margherita', Italy Antonio Quatraro, e-mail: [email protected] www.punctus.org

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Digital Libraries and Archives EASAIER Enabling Access to Sound Archives through Integration, Enrichment and Retrieval

EASAIER will offer enhanced access to sound archives through the integration of speech and music processing, cross-media retrieval and interactivity tools.

EASAIER focuses on several key areas to improve access to sound archives: multi- and crossmedia retrieval, interactivity tools, integration of speech and music processing methods, and systemic archive analysis. The project will develop innovative audio processing, data mining, and visualisation techniques, alongside user needs and evaluation studies, and integrate them into prototypes. One research objective is to improve the separation and representation of sound objects from audio signals. Towards this goal, the project will establish a common set of metadata and map various existing archive ontologies. Machine learning will be used for computing high-level descriptors such as rhythm complexity or tonality. Further, segmentation and source separation techniques will be improved in order to allow users to access, analyse and listen to the finer details of a recording. Another objective of EASAIER is to provide online interactive tools for end-users and enrich the browsing experience. Features developed in this respect will be for example time-stretching, allowing to slow down (or speed up) recordings without modifying the pitch, or transcription of a piece of music into score notation systems for specific instruments. EASAIER will also deliver multiple retrieval tools. Multilingual speech indexing applied to mixed audio archives (speech, music and other sound objects) will enable the retrieval of spoken audio content by text-based queries, and a vocal query interface will facilitate voice-initiated speech retrieval. For music search, the fingerprinting of audio files will be enhanced through higher-level features, delivering results related to the query through melodic and harmonic similarity. Sound object recognition tools, able to identify the sources of sounds, will allow for example searches by instrument type. Cross-media retrieval techniques will search content in various formats (audio or video recordings, notated scores, images etc…). A suite of tools for ontology editing and library management will be set up that allows for different multimedia archives to be mapped, aligned and integrated. Users will be able not only to locate sound materials, but also to link them with related objects. The system will be designed for libraries, museums, broadcast archives, music schools and archives. However, the tools may be used by anyone, amateur or professional, interested in new ways of experimenting with archive material.


STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project) 1 May 2006 30 months € 2 100 000 7 Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, UK Dr Josh Reiss, e-mail: [email protected] http://www.easaier.org/

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Digital Libraries and Archives EthnoArc Linked European Archives for Ethnomusicological Research

EthnoArc supports access to scientific collections of traditional popular music by providing a system for digital representation, multi-archive retrieval and comparative research.

EthnoArc focuses on digital European archives for ethnomusicological research, a comparative science dealing with oral music traditions. Typically, an ethnographic field collection consists of a multi-format, unpublished body of materials gathered and organised by an anthropologist, folklorist, ethnomusicologist, or other cultural researcher. The collection may contain materials from a wide range of formats, including sound recordings, drawings, photographs, field notes, and correspondence. Electronic representations of ethnographic collections make it possible for researchers to explore the various resources without risking to damage originals and in the context of other materials. However, the use of existing digital archives is limited by the fact that they were developed independently and apply different metadata structures, making comparisons of data almost impossible. Against this background, the primary goals of the EthnoArc project are to define and implement a system that supports − the digital representation of rich and complex information; − searching and research of source materials, even if stored in different and differently structured archives; − various types of scientific approaches, such as sociological, ethnological, ethnomusicological, psychological or linguistic approaches. The project will also build a ‘production chain’ for digitising content and entering metadata in order to show the capability of the system to handle legacy data and to demonstrate the potential of richer, more complex metadata for advanced research purposes. By involving expert scholars in the definition of parameters and in the evaluation process, it will be ensured that the technical solutions fit the needs of the archive users and allow for a wide range of research questions. Overall, this work will contribute to secure, document and present a significant part of Europe's cultural heritage – traditional popular music.


STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project) 1 September 2006 24 months € 706 000 7 Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin e.V. Dr Katharina Biegger, e-mail: [email protected] http://www.ethnoarc.org/

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Digital Libraries and Archives IMAGINATION Image-based Navigation in Multimedia Archives

IMAGINATION aims to ease knowledge gain from digital cultural and scientific resources by enabling navigation through images and their context.

Point of departure for IMAGINATION is that the human brain is more efficient in processing information in visual than in textual form and that knowledge is generated not from single information items but from information in context. The project's research goal is thus to explore how information systems could become more performing in supporting image-based and contextaware interaction. Currently available methods for searching and accessing large repositories based on image content still present shortcomings in usability and performance. This is due to the limited feasibility to generate semantic descriptions for images. Based on recent technologies such as RDF and OWL, it is possible today to define semantic metadata for images, and use it for the three main tasks of information systems: to find relevant resources, to support user navigation and to display contextual information. However, existing image segmentation and image recognition algorithms cannot yet reach a level of precision adequate for automatic annotation. To solve this problem, IMAGINATION proposes to make use of the fact that resources are not stored alone in a repository, but they are usually embedded in and together with other resources. IMAGINATION plans to develop a browsing environment that will help logically and predictably organise a database of images and texts and facilitate the user's search tasks through efficient and automatic browsing tools. Work towards this goal will consist in combining and further developing recent techniques in the fields of text-mining, image segmentation and image recognition. This will result in a set of new technologies and tools that support the manual, semi-automatic and automatic annotation of images with high-level semantic metadata. This high-quality metadata will be used to visualise the context of resources (images and texts) stored in knowledge spaces, and thus make them more meaningful for users. IMAGINATION's work will create the basis for a new type of multimedia archive: applying the paradigm of the web, where navigation is based on interlinked text, the project will build an imageweb, where images and parts of images are semi-automatically interlinked and browsable.


STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project) 1 Mai 2006 36 months € 2 130 000 8 Forschungszentrum Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe Mr. Clemens van Dinther, e-mail: [email protected] www.imagination-project.org

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Digital Libraries and Archives MEMORIES Design of an audio semantic indexation system allowing information retrieval for the access to archive content

MEMORIES will design an OAIS-based application combining computer assistance for developers of audio databases and a smart search engine for audiovisual information retrieval.

Acquiring media content, structuring and attaching metadata and controls, archiving and exploiting it in various modes are complex processes. This is particularly true for sound signals, which are often composite and can basically be described with one or all of the descriptors: noise, speech, music. Whilst available indexation systems are satisfactory for professional use as regards monocomponent sound signals, their performance drastically decreases as soon as several components are present. High level information is difficult to obtain, for instance if the operator's task is to transcribe speech content of a recording in presence of noise or music. The MEMORIES project team aims at overcoming these problems through a generic software library that facilitates extraction of high level information from audio signals. From the archivist point-of-view, the proposed application will present a flexible and effective tool for information indexation in audio resources and support the development of audio databases. It will provide operators with a maximum of computer assistance for attaching ontology and semantics to the content and with an innovative facility of source separation, combined with classical 'Speech to Text' and 'Wave to Midi' transcription functions. From the user point-of-view, this application will appear as an accurate and robust tool for audiovisual information retrieval from large databases. Core facility of the search engine will be advanced search based on semantic associations. Its development will apply strategies generated for biology and genetics, using the textual annotation associated with and within the media. Finally, the project will design an implementation, named AXIS, of the reference model presented in the ISO standard 'Open Archival Information Systems' (OAIS). This will guarantee that the system is open to the acquisition and to the exploitation of data from both old archives and new productions. It will also assure persistence (integrity and long term availability of the data), interoperability (capacity to exchange subsets of the databases), scalability (capacity to operate from small to large systems), and adaptability (capacity to be adapted to specific contextdependent needs). The indexation technology developed by MEMORIES will help to turn huge amounts of archival audio data into valuable knowledge that eventually can lead to the creation of products that may finance digitisation of analogue audio material held by the institutions. Outlets for the smart search engine could emerge in fields such as education, broadcasting or telecommunications.

Project facts

Project type: Start date: Duration: Funding: Number of partners: Project coordinator: Contact: Project website

STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project) 1 June 2006 36 months € 1 225 000 7 MEMNON Audio Archiving Services, Belgium Michel Merten, e-mail: [email protected] http://www.memories-project.eu/index.html

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Digital Libraries and Archives MOSAICA Semantically Enhanced, Multifaceted, Collaborative Access to Cultural Heritage

MOSAICA will design a technology toolbox for intelligent presentation, knowledge-based discovery and interactive and creative educational experience covering a broad variety of cultural heritage resources.

After almost 2000 years of Diaspora, Jewish heritage is an outstanding example of global cultural presence, with a strong historical impact on many nations, particularly in Europe. This is why the MOSAICA project team has selected Jewish heritage as a showcase for technologies for the presentation and discovery of diversified cultural content and its use in education. MOSAICA is envisioned as a technologically advanced web portal, featuring multifaceted interfaces for knowledge-based exploration and online utilities empowering users to collaboratively author and manage cultural resources in a globally distributed environment. The MOSAICA interfaces include: −

− −

−

GIS (Geographical Information System) empowered map. The project team plans to empower the GIS with semantic web technologies, and thus allow for dynamically created semantic references between the information displayed on the map. By applying logical reasoning the spatial navigation will be extended into the temporal dimension. Semantic directory. The MOSAICA ontology will be generated dynamically from multiple distributed ontologies on Jewish heritage already available online. Semantic search engine. The search and retrieval facility will be empowered with logical reasoning allowing semantic inference and extending keyword querying into the domain of conceptualisation. Both the semantic directory and the semantic search engine will allow seamless integration of diversified cultural resources into a single conceptual frame. Repository of educational resources. Users will be enabled to discover the worlds of MOSAICA on the paths of virtual expeditions, built as thematically organised successions of virtualised cultural objects, bound together by a conceptual model, and allowing interactive exploration through alternative trails.

Besides, MOSAICA will develop a framework for the ontology-based, interactive conceptualisation of cultural resources, using the following online utilities: − − −

Online semantic annotator. Free-text annotation tools will allow users to comment and recommend individual cultural objects or to associate them with relevant ontological concepts. Online ontology editor. The editor empowers users with convivial means to further develop their own conceptual models, and to dynamically enrich the MOSAICA ontology with their own semantics. Virtual expedition maker. This is a set of complementary online utilities based on a comprehensive methodology for developing educational resources that guide users in designing their own virtual expeditions.

Project facts

Project type: Start date: Duration: Funding: Number of partners: Project coordinator: Contact: Project website:

STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project) 1 June 2006 30 months € 2 500 000 11 ORT France Mr. Raphaël Attias, e-mail: [email protected] http://www.mosaica-project.eu/

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Digital Libraries and Archives MultiMATCH Multilingual/Multimedia Access to Cultural Heritage

MultiMATCH plans to develop a multilingual search engine specifically designed for access, organisation and personalised presentation of cultural heritage information.

On the web, cultural heritage content is everywhere, in traditional environments such as libraries, museums, galleries and audiovisual archives, but also in popular magazines and newspapers, in multiple languages and multiple media. The aim of the MultiMATCH project is to enable users to explore and interact with online accessible cultural heritage content, across media types and language boundaries. The MultiMATCH search engine will be able to: − − −

− − −

identify relevant material via an in-depth crawling of selected cultural heritage institutions, accepting and processing any semantic web encoding of the information retrieved; crawl the Internet to identify websites with cultural heritage information, locating relevant texts, images and videos, regardless of the source and target languages used to write the query and/or describe the results; automatically classify the results in a semantic-web compliant fashion, based on a document’s content, on its metadata, on its context, and on the occurrence of relevant cultural heritage concepts in the document, and automatically extract relevant information which then can be used to create cross-links between related material, such as the biography of an artist, exhibitions of his/her work, critical analyses, etc.; organise and further analyse the material crawled to serve focused queries generated from the information needs formulated by the user; interact with the user to obtain a more specific definition of an initial information requirement; organise and display search results in an integrated, user-friendly manner, allowing users to access and exploit the information retrieved regardless of language barriers.

The project's R&D work is organised around three activities: −

− −

User-oriented research activities will primarily investigate the user requirements and consequent definition of the required functionality of the system, content selection and preparation, studies on the ontologies adopted by cultural heritage institutions and the semantic encoding to be adopted by the system. System-oriented research activities include the study and development of software components for the acquisition, indexing, classification, retrieval and presentation of multilingual cultural heritage information in diverse and mixed media and their integration in the system prototypes. Validation activities will include testing of the system and its integrated components.

In November 2007, MultiMATCH has produced a first prototype of the search engine. A demo version is available on the project website.

Project facts


STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project) 1 May 2006 30 months € 3 114 000 11 Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie dell’Informazione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy Dr Carol Peters, e-mail: [email protected] http://www.multimatch.eu/index.html

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Digital Libraries and Archives P2P-FUSION Peer to Peer Fusion

P2P-FUSION supports creative reuse of audio and video through an open, accessible, legal and economically efficient environment for audiovisual cultural activities.

One of the promises shown by the digital age is for more open and democratic creative cultural practices. New tools enable users to open their own 'media channels' and reach large audiences with content and operating concepts that differ from those of the traditional mass media. Culture has always been built upon the work of others, but with PCs being used at the same time for consuming and for producing digital media, each reader/viewer can become a creator/editor/reviewer, and can feed their own contributions back to the mediaspace. Today's technologies open it to everybody to become a creative actor in the 'web of culture'. In the domain of audio and video, the exploitation of this potential is impeded through the lack of internet technologies that adequately support creative audio and video applications; and of systems and practices in intellectual property and rights management that match the facilities of the digital tools at the users' hands. The P2P-FUSION project aims to create an open, accessible, legal and economically efficient environment for creative audiovisual cultural activities that can also be based on the work of others and on materials from cultural institutions, through built-in, easy-to-use support for suitable licensing schemes. The software platform will overcome some of the main limitations of current P2P systems and adds new features such as a set of tools for building social media applications, a distributed semantic database, social processing, machine readable licenses, and capabilities to edit, address and distribute also fragments of audiovisual content. Practical viability of the projects' work will be ensured through awareness raising activities towards end-users, and through involving a number of selected user communities as co-design partners for the applications to be developed. Two major audiovisual archives will be integrated into the system as both content sources and repositories for newly created content. In addition, the project will contribute to the development of new social, legal and technical solutions for intellectual property issues, through: − − − −

offering built-in support for embedded, integrated and easy to use licensing schemes; supporting open content licensing such as Creative Commons; investigating the legal aspects of technological and social design solutions; organising a social process for mapping intellectual property related problems and envisioning novel solutions.


STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project) 1 June 2006 36 months € 2 600 000 7 University of Art and Design Helsinki, Media Lab, Finland Prof. Philip Dean, e-mail: [email protected] http://p2p-fusion.org

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Digital Libraries and Archives QVIZ Query and Context Based VIsualiZations of time-spatial Cultural Dynamics

QVIZ is envisioned as a collaborative time- and map-based environment for accessing digital archival resources making use of administrative units and through building on the knowledge contributed by communities of practice.

A common dilemma for European cultural heritage institutions is that the organisation and presentation of archival information are so complex that they restrict easy access to the material. Another problem is that knowledge within communities of practice is often neglected. Archival records and knowledge in communities of practice are commonly related to administrative units, such as parishes and municipalities. End users, however, are not often allowed to explore the material on this basis. While such access would be advantageous, it is made complex because administrative units frequently change over time and because archival systems rarely provide a rich time-space context. With these problems being solved, cultural heritage institutions could provide marketable services unavailable today, with the potential to increase the usage of archival material among local historians, researchers and the general public. The QVIZ project team plans to address this challenge by researching and creating a framework for visualising and querying archival resources with innovative features. It will offer a time-space interface based on maps and emergent knowledge structures and also integrate social software, such as wikis, in order to utilise knowledge in existing and new communities of practice. QVIZ will lead to improved information sharing and knowledge creation, easier access to information in a user-adapted context and innovative ways of exploring and visualising materials over time, between countries and other administrative units. The common European framework for sharing and accessing archival information provided by the QVIZ project will open a considerably larger commercial market based on archival materials as well as a richer understanding of European history. The consortium consists of seven partners from universities, archival institutions and companies from Sweden, Austria, Estonia, Spain and the UK.

Project facts

Project type: Start date: Duration: Funding: Number of partners: Project coordinator: Contact: Project website:

STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project) 1 May 2006 24 months € 1 600 000 7 Umeå Universitet, Sveden Dr. Patrik Svensson, e-mail: [email protected] http://qviz.eu/

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(Virtual) Museums and Sites CINeSPACE Experiencing urban film and cultural heritage while on the move

CINeSPACE will design and implement a mobile rich media information exchange platform for the promotion of urban film and cultural heritage.

Cinema is both an instrument of imagination and a witness of instants, places and visions situated in time and space. Film heritage has a strong potential for promoting architecture, history, literature or cultural diversity. The CINeSPACE project team will exploit this potential to promote access to urban and cultural objects through new interactive and creative experiences. The scenario in the background of the CINeSPACE research and development work describes innovative ways of navigating a city. Audiovisual information including images, text, sounds and movies will be delivered through low-cost wireless binoculars. A small camera records and sends what the user is 'seeing'. Through this equipment, users are enabled to tap into the multimedia databases of the city on the basis of their location, profile and choice of subject. Furthermore, in this scenario users will not only be able to experience but also to create visual information while 'on-the-move' and to interact with others. By employing the inbuilt camera they can produce a video sequence with annotations and send it through a WLAN hotspot or 3G connection to generate a tour log to be downloaded or shared from the web. Technically, the CINeSPACE project will work towards the following objectives: − to integrate existing standards (ontologies, MPEG), and to go beyond them, in order to provide semantic access to indexed multimedia cultural content; − to create an integrated, light weighted, wearable high definition display, combined with compression/decompression audio/video streaming hardware and a wireless network connection; − to create a hybrid outdoor tracking system combining different techniques (GPS, image processing, inertial sensors) for precise positioning and generation of augmented reality content; − to explore the application of collaborative mobile information technologies to deliver and create rich media information based on the location of the user within urban spaces. The result envisaged is a rich media software delivery platform, capable of distributing locationbased specific information related to urban film and cultural heritage. The platform will be validated in three cities, through pilot experiences oriented to each of the three end user groups targeted. The target groups and cities are: − Film tourists – pilot in Venice: People that choose a tourist destination due to its relationship with cinema (famous international film festivals, shooting locations). − Cinema professionals – pilot in San Sebastián: Film producers that want to know possible stages and film facilities of specific urban environments. − Citizens – pilot in Glasgow: Residents of cities who have stories to tell and want to know more about their own home.

Project facts


STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project) 1 July 2006 36 months € 1 870 000 9 Fomento de San Sebastian SA, Spain Mrs. Elisabeth Jorge, e-mail: [email protected] http://www.cinespace.eu

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(Virtual) Museums and Sites ISAAC Integrated e-Services for Advanced Access to Heritage in Cultural Tourist Destinations

ISAAC is a multi-disciplinary project aiming to valorise cultural assets as tourism resources through user-friendly and stakeholder-relevant e-services.

Tourism potentially is a key generator of the resources necessary to preserve and enhance cultural heritage in a sustainable way. ICT solutions, combined with the projected increases in bandwidth for both wired and wireless communication and new developments in data standards and web ontology languages (e.g. OWL) can help to create added value by providing better services. But successful implementation of the emerging technology depends on a high degree of cooperation across sectors, research disciplines and borders. The ISAAC project aims to pave the way towards more efficient use of ICT services in cultural tourism by gathering the appropriate range of expertise needed to address this problem. The project team seeks to develop a novel user-friendly and stakeholder-relevant ICT environment envisioned both as a distributed repository of intelligent cultural heritage content and as a software architecture enabling content interoperability (service-oriented) and content customised access and presentation (agent-oriented). Services provided via the web to European cultural destinations will support the tourism experience life cycle. One of these services will assume the form of a decision support system, integrating state of the art multi-criteria analysis tools for policy makers. The ISAAC IT-platform integrates diverse and dispersed knowledge on cultural tourism and local heritage for the benefit of users willing to gain knowledge on European tourist destinations before, during or after a visit, and of citizens in their dual role of potential tourists and active part of the composition and promotion of the tourism offer in their community. Besides, it supports decisionmakers involved in the management of touristic offers and of the city as an attractive community, as well as other private or public stakeholders involved in activities linked with the cultural tourism market and destination promotion, such as attraction managers, travel agents, hoteliers, retailers, publishers or cities’ tourism offices. As a result, a multi-stakeholder community for experiencing and managing European cultural heritage in urban cultural destinations will evolve. To support inclusive governing and management of cultural tourism destinations, ISAAC is currently developing an e-governance framework that will enable cities to assess the implications of strengthening ICT services in local cultural heritage attractions and improve urban decision- and policy-making. ISAAC brings together researchers, ICT companies, city authorities and cultural institutions, pooling knowledge and experience in the fields of digital culture and heritage, cultural tourism management and urban e-governance.


STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project) 1 September 2006 36 months € 1 580 000 16 Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe GmbH, Germany Dr. Krassimira Paskaleva-Shapira, e-mail: [email protected] http://www.isaac-project.eu

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(Virtual) Museums and Sites iTACITUS Intelligent Tourism and Cultural Information through Ubiquitous Services

iTACITUS investigates new methods for representing historical sites virtually and develop mobile technologies for dynamic, user-directed support to visitors.

iTACITUS aims to provide a bespoke experience for the individual cultural traveller, based upon a dispersed repository of cultural (e.g. historical, scientific and archaeological) resources, enabling both location-based and context-based interface paired with location-independent services. The services provided will include audio-visual, mixed reality and virtual reality organisational components, and will be delivered in a flexible and timely fashion. The system will be based on an advanced user interface on mobile devices that supports image recognition and the capability of using any available hardware interface: WiFi, Bluetooth, UMTS/GPRS or infrared interfacing. iTACITUS will provide a virtual context supporting knowledge conceptualisation, thus making the available cultural resources reusable and integrable into new conceptual contexts. With an equipment of this kind a user is able to locate, without a direct access to search engines, and to find information that is likely to be useful in his present cultural context. iTACITUS suggests an active approach to cultural heritage by integrating individual real-time experiences and thus contributes to narrowing the gap between the expert researcher in the cultural field and the cultured and informed visitor. The framework is also designed for reusing available digital material integrating additional, often complex new information. The work is carried out by six partners, combining expertise in the fields of artificial intelligence, distributed architecture and infrastructure management, VR and AR systems and content provision, as well as end users in different cultural environments.


STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project) 1 September 2006 30 months € 1 350 000 6 BMT limited, UK Mr. Rory Doyle, e-mail: [email protected] http://itacitus.org

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(Virtual) Museums and Sites VENUS Virtual Exploration of Underwater Sites

The VENUS project is providing scientific methodologies and technological tools for the virtual exploration of deep underwater archaeology sites.

Underwater archaeological sites, for example shipwrecks, offer extraordinary opportunities for archaeologists due to factors such as darkness, low temperatures and a low oxygen rate which are favourable to preservation. On the other hand, these sites cannot be experienced first hand and today are continuously jeopardized by activities such as deep trawling that destroy their surface layer. The VENUS project will improve the accessibility of underwater sites by generating thorough and exhaustive 3D records for virtual exploration, as it addresses sites which are reachable by divers as well as those only reachable with submersible vehicles. The project team surveys antique shipwrecks at various depths in Italy, Portugal and France. It explores advanced methods and techniques of data acquisition through autonomous or remotely operated unmanned vehicles with innovative sonar and photogrammetry equipment. Research also covers aspects such as data processing and storage, plotting of archaeological artefacts and information system management. This work will result in a series of best practices and procedures for collecting and storing data. Further, VENUS develops virtual reality and augmented reality tools for the visualization of and immersive interaction with a digital model of an underwater site. The model will be made accessible online, both as an example of digital preservation and for demonstrating new facilities of exploration in a safe, cost-effective and pedagogical environment. The virtual underwater site provides archaeologists with an improved insight into the data and the general public with simulated dives to the site. The VENUS consortium, composed of eleven partners, is pooling expertise in various disciplines: archaeology and underwater exploration, knowledge representation and photogrammetry, virtual reality and digital data preservation. By now, VENUS has assembled a collection of underwater exploration best practices and is finalising the underwater data acquisition. Currently, the project team is developing procedures for gathering data from underwater sites and an immersive demonstrator.


STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project) 1 July 2006 36 months € 2 190 000 11 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Modèles et Simulation pour l'Architecture, l'urbanisme et le Paysage; France Pierre Drap; e-mail: [email protected] http://www.venus-project.eu

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