Grants

The Europeana Sounds is Europeana¢s 'missing' fifth domain aggregator, joining APEX (Archives), EUscreen (television), the Europeana Film Gateway (film) and TEL (libraries). It will increase the opportunities for access to and creative re-use of Europeana's audio and audio-related content and will build a sustainable best practice network of stakeholders in the content value chain to aggregate, enrich and share a critical mass of audio that meets the needs of public audiences, the creative industries (notably publishers) and researchers. The consortium of 24 partners from 12 countries will: *Double the number of audio items accessible through Europeana to over 1 million and improve geographical and thematic coverage by aggregating items with widespread popular appeal such as contemporary and classical music, traditional and folk music, the natural world, oral memory, and languages and dialects. *Add meaningful contextual knowledge and medium-specific metadata to 2 million items in Europeana's audio and audio-related collections, developing techniques for cross-media and cross-collection linking. *Develop and validate audience-specific sound channels and a distributed crowdsourcing infrastructure for end-users that will improve Europeana's search facility, navigation and user experience. These can then be used for other communities and other media. *Engage music publishers and rights-holders in efforts to make more material accessible online through Europeana by resolving domain constraints and lack of access to commercially unviable (i.e. out-of-commerce) content. These outcomes will be achieved through a network of leading sound archives working with specialists in audiovisual technology, rights issues and software development. The network will expand to include other content-providers and mainstream distribution platforms (Historypin, Spotify, Soundcloud) to ensure widest possible availability of their content.

The objective of AMBROSIA is to promote the wider reuse of the digital cultural resources available through Europeana by the Creative Industries to boost creativity and business development across Europe. In order to provide a strong thematic identity which will connect the public, Creative Industries and the culture sector, AMBROSIA will focus on the subject of Europe¢s food and drink culture, with a specific emphasis on 3 themes: My Food and Drink Life –focusing on the personal and domestic aspects of food and drink; Food and Drink in the Community –focusing on the social and community aspects of food and drink; The Food and Drink Industry - focusing on the cultivation, manufacture, production and distribution of food and drink. AMBROSIA will achieve its objective by delivering 4 connected tracks of activity: In the Content Track, we will discover, prepare, license and upload to Europeana 50,000-70,000 unique high-quality digital assets and their associated metadata; In the Public Engagement Track, we will engage the public, retailers and distributors in campaigns, piloting and crowd activities to encourage them to share and make use of food and drink-related content; In the Creative Applications track, we will work with Creative Industry partners to develop a suite of 9 innovative creative and commercial applications, deliver 3 Open Innovation Challenges and extend the Europeana Open Labs network; In the Learning Track, we will develop and share new knowledge, understanding and guidance on successful public/private partnerships focussed on digital cultural content. The AMBROSIA Work Plan will be supported by structured project management, continuity planning and a strand of proactive communication and dissemination.

Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP-2013-7 

The required high level of customization to individual user needs and the living context is enabled through the use of body-worn sensors as well as sensors that are embedded in the seniors’ living environment. We will apply innovative methods for analyzing sensor data in order to obtain new insights about the residents’ current activity, physical condition and state of mind as well as their surroundings. Following a user-centered approach, we will implement four product-near CARE demonstrators that will be installed and evaluated in the homes of Greek and German pilot users. Along with the collection and analysis of country-specific user requirements and technology usage patterns, the project paves the way for the timely exploitation of the project results. The goals set for CARE are of high relevance to Germany and Greece since both countries have to face a dramatic demographic change the impact of which is already evident in the increasing number of elderly people living alone. CARE is of great mutual benefit both for the German and the Greek consortium partners since the technologies and skills provided by the partners complement each other in an excellent manner allowing all three partners to integrate their research activities in the field of assistance systems for seniors.

Funded under:by German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)

EUscreenXL is a three-year project that aggregates a comprehensive body of professional audiovisual content and makes it accessible through Europeana and the EUscreenXL portal. The project consortium consists of 22 leading audiovisual archives, excellent media scholars, skilled technical service providers and the EBU. The partnership has established alliances with key stakeholders as the Europeana Foundation, FIAT/IFTA. EUscreenXL represents a considerable segment of Europe’s creative industries and has a particular strong link to the public service broadcasting community.

Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP.2012.2.1

LoCloud (Local content in a Europeana cloud) aims to build on the achievements of CARARE in establishing a repository-based aggregator for Archaeological and Architectural heritage and of Europeana Local in its work with local institutions and their regional and national aggregators, which resulted in the contribution to date of well over 5 million items to Europeana. The main goals of LoCloud are: - to continue to ease the task of enabling heritage organisations in making their contents accessible via Europeana, by using cloud technologies - to facilitate aggregation of digital content from small and medium cultural institutions, to be made available to Europeana; - to enable smaller institutions such as house-museums to contribute their content to Europeana; - to explore the potential of cloud computing for aggregation, enrichment and re-use, with a special focus on geographic location.

Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP.2012.2.1

AthenaPlus will build on the successful experience developed by the previous ATHENA project – where LIDO and the ATHENA Ingestion Server and Mapping Tool (MINT), widely used across the Europeana’s ecosystem of projects including the ongoing Linked Heritage project were developed, in order to further advance and complete the effective infrastructure and tools developed to support museums and other cultural institutions in their work to making available digital content through Europeana. The principal objectives of the AthenaPlus project are to: - Contribute more than 3.8 millions metadata records to Europeana - Improve search, retrieval and re-use of Europeana’s content - Experiment with enriched metadata their re-use adapted for users with different needs The AthenaPlus content comes from more than 540 cultural institutions (more than 80% museums).

Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP.2012.2.1

Europeana Creative is a European Commission funded project with the aims of supporting and promoting the re-use of cultural resources available via Europeana by realising a set of concrete objectives: - establish the Europeana Open Labs Network - the new Europeana Content Re-use Framework will extend the Europeana Licensing Framework - implement the infrastructure and essential transformation services needed to successfully support re-use - create five pilot applications in thematic areas . 

Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP.2012.2.1

Social&Smart is a research project using the housekeeping scenario to experiment a pervasive Future Internet network that provides real services to a wide population. The goal is to devise an infrastructure allowing all appliances in the home to speak to a middleware where any user can easily create cognitive and scalable solutions in the cloud to manage them. It offers a knowledge management milieu where the user interacts with a social network to issue what we call recipes, i.e. a list of instructions for the devices embedded in a simplified scripting language. Through the recipes, s/he generates real workflows embedding commands that are finely tuned through cognitive processes based both on user feedbacks and on knowledge and services shared with the other members of the network. The typical storyboard is the one where housekeepers exchange recipes, for instance to wash dirty clothes, in terms of scripts or API calls that get improved iteratively on the basis of the statics on their efficiency. The general strategy is to experiment Future Internet from the human centric perspective, where the users, and not universal procedures, are the owners of the rules operating the things. As members of a social network they share needs, knowledge, services and feedbacks within a networked intelligence to jointly improve their individual ability to rule the appliances at their service.

Funded under: FP7-ICT

The aim of the project is to contribute towards a move away from traditional assistive software which uses a computer simply as an alternative to pen and paper and towards developing develop next generation learning software which uses a computer system to facilitate the learning process for children with dyslexia and/or dysorthographia. Towards this end, the Consortium will develop an Integrated Intelligent Learning Environment for Reading and Writing (ILearnRW) demonstrating the following features: 1. User modeling. In an intelligent learning system, a profile for each learner should be built and correlate with user group profiles. The profile, among other things, should include the type of dyslexia, the error types the user is likely to make and their severity, the learner’s age and cognitive age, as well as information related to the learning history and progress during the usage of the system. 2. Teaching strategies. The interaction of a learning system with a child should be based on a teaching strategy that supports the individual user in fulfilling its learning goals, i.e., to learn to read and write/spell correctly. 3. Classification of learning material. Education content classification should be an integral component in any learning management system, regardless of whether the reading/writing activities are part of a structured teaching strategy. For example in conventional teaching approaches, a tutor helping a child to learn reading/writing always selects with particular care the learning material to use based on the child’s needs and capabilities. 4. Personalized content presentation. If the errors the user is more likely to make are known or modeled, we can enrich the text presentation with more visual cues using techniques which combine highlighting, text-reformatting and word segmentation. In addition, the type of dyslexia of the specific user should greatly influence the text presentation process. 5. Engaging learning activities. Children are easily distracted from an activity if they do not find it interesting and motivated. High degree of learner engagement should be sought in any learning activity. To achieve this goal, we choose to integrate learning activities into serious games where the game scenarios and interaction mechanisms will depend on the learner’s profile, the learning strategy adopted and the student’s progress or performance. It is anticipated that a creative game scenario, especially if it is coupled with a positive reinforcement mechanism, will extend the time period a child engages in learning activities. 6. Evaluation of learning. We conjecture that when a game is coupled with a game usage logging mechanism, valuable data can be collected regarding the user’s actions during the game, and given that certain actions are associated with successful learning events, a quantitative assessment of learning can be inferred and his profile can be consequently updated. 7. On-line resource bank. It should contain coherent collections of data which support specific teaching strategies and constitute well structured learning/intervention programs, forming a resource bank valuable to learners, educators and dyslexia professionals. The resource bank should be also to offer its customized views of its material to each learner, based on the learner’s profile, i.e., the resource bank should be profile-sensitive. The ILearnRW environment will support the English and Greek languages.

Funded under: FP7-ICT

Partage Plus will create an access point to information (through the project website) and digital content (through Europeana) on the European cultural heritage of the Art Nouveau period. It provides a means and a structure for the digitisation of content from different domains and different countries and making it available for citizens using Europeana.

Funded under: CIP ICT-PSP