2013
AthenaPlus: Access to cultural heritage networks for Europeana
AthenaPlus: Access to cultural heritage networks for Europeana

March 2013 (40 months)

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

EC: Europeana Creative
EC: Europeana Creative

February 2013 (36 months)

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

2012
Social & Smart: Social housekeeping through intercommunicating appliances and shared recipes merged in a pervasive web-services infrastructure
Social & Smart: Social housekeeping through intercommunicating appliances and shared recipes merged in a pervasive web-services infrastructure

November 2012 (30 months)

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

 

ILearnRW:  Integrated Intelligent Learning Environment for Reading and Writing
ILearnRW: Integrated Intelligent Learning Environment for Reading and Writing

October 2012 (3 months)

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

Europeana Fashion: Europeana Fashion
Europeana Fashion: Europeana Fashion

March 2012 (36 months)

Europeana Fashion is a best practice network co-funded under the CIP ICT-PSP programme and composed by 23 partners from 12 European countries, which represent the leading European institutions and collections in the fashion domain. The consortium will aggregate and provide to Europeana the most outstanding and rich materials about the history of European fashion, include more than 700.000 fashion-related digital objects, ranging from historical dresses to accessories, photographs, posters, drawings, sketches, videos, and fashion catalogues. The Europeana Fashion best practice network aims at: 1) Aggregating and harmonizing existing digital content coming from the most important and interesting public and private European fashion collections, ingesting this fashion-related content into Europeana. 2) Improving interoperability between scattered and heterogeneous collections, promoting the use of the Europeana Data Model and developing tools, such as a specialized Fashion Thesaurus, to best handle the multilingual nature of the aggregated content. 3) Providing access to this digital content also through the creation of a dedicated fashion portal that will serve as a specialized access point to heterogeneous fashion collections across Europe. 4) Developing tools and services for the integration of user generated content that will enrich and complement the standard metadata descriptions and will support the contextualization of the aggregated content through the connection with open content sources like Wikipedia. 5) Actively engaging the European fashion community in museums, universities and in the private sector, raising awareness on best practices on digitization, IPR issues and semantic interoperability developed inside the BPN and in the Europeana family of projects.


Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP.2011.2.1

PARTAGE PLUS: Digitising and Enabling Art Nouveau for Europeana
PARTAGE PLUS: Digitising and Enabling Art Nouveau for Europeana

March 2012 (30 months)

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 

DM2E: Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana
DM2E: Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana

February 2012 (36 months)

The project aims to technically enable as many content providers as possible to integrate their content into Europeana. Since different providers make their data available in different formats, a tool has to be developed that converts metadata from a diverse range of source formats into the EDM (Europeana Data Model). During the project, this will exemplarily be done for the autograph database Kalliope (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin), the German text archive Deutsches Textarchiv (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften), as well as content of the Austrian national library (Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek) plus a number of other sources. Metadata providers are strongly encouraged to make their data available under CC0, as all other licenses hamper further use by Europeana and scholars. Finally, Europeana is going to provide the aggregated data in a form which allows Digital Humanities scholars to make best use of them. In addition, basic services / functionalities (modeled on the humanities “scholarly primitives”) will be provided by Europeana. In this perspective, the proposed project is in line with theme 2 of the call (Digital Content) and targets its objective 2.1 (Aggregating content in Europeana). The proposed Best Practice Network will respond to all three possible actions, namely: Aggregation of existing digital cultural heritage content (WP1) Alignment of metadata and mappings with the specifications of Europeana (WP2) Improvements in the interoperability of CMSs and the Europeana platform (WP 2 and 3) In tackling these three actions we will take particular care to target one specific user community of Europeana, namely reaserachers in the field of “Digital Humanities” and the way these will interact with Europeana through our WP3. Furthermore, the data migration and enrichment workflow proposed as part of WP2 will be modeled in such a way as to allow for its reuse in the migration of almost any generic and proprietary source to the EDM target.

Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP.2011.2.1

EuropeanaPhotography: EUROPEAN Ancient PHOTOgraphic vintaGe repositoRies of digitAized Pictures of Historical qualitY
EuropeanaPhotography: EUROPEAN Ancient PHOTOgraphic vintaGe repositoRies of digitAized Pictures of Historical qualitY

February 2012 (36 months)

EuropeanaPhotography is a great and quite unique consortium and project putting together some of the most prestigious photographic archives, public libraries and photographic museums covering specifically the length of time from the beginning of photography (1839 with the first example of images from Fox Talbot and Daguerre) to the beginning of the Second World War (1939). EuropeanaPhotography is therefore covering a precise historical period in order to bring into Europeana some of the most important, precious and beautiful images from a very important period that crated so much changes in Europe in several sectors as a proof of diversity and richness at the same time: from the industrial revolution to the social conquests, from the improvements of the photographic processes (salt print, albumen prints, collodion glass plates to the modern gelatin silver photos to the history of important, unknown and famous photographic ateliers of photography), to the changes of the lifestyle of our citizens, from the changes of our cityscapes to the changes of our landscapes, from the First World War to the Grand Europeans Expo Pavilions......


Funded under: CIP ICT-PSP

3D-ICONS: 3D Digitisation of Icons of European Architectural and Archaeological Heritage
3D-ICONS: 3D Digitisation of Icons of European Architectural and Archaeological Heritage

February 2012 (36 months)

3D-ICONS proposes to digitize a series of architectural and archaeological masterpieces of world and European cultural significance and provide 3D models and related digital content to Europeana, with the aim of contributing to the critical mass of highly engaging content available to users. Public fascination with the architectural and archaeological heritage is well known, it is proven to be one of the main reasons for tourism according to the UN World Tourism Organisation. Historic buildings and archaeological monuments form a significant component Europe’s cultural heritage, they are the physical testimonies of European history and of the different events that led to the creation of the European landscape, as we know it today. The project will exploit existing tools and methods, to integrate them in a complete supply chain of 3D digitization to contribute a significant mass of 3D content to Europeana. The project will focus on UNESCO World Heritage monuments and other monuments of outstanding value at European level, to illustrate a particular strand of Europe’s history. The digital content will include overall 3D models and reconstructions, enlarged models of important details, images, texts, videos. It will also include and re-contextualize in 3D, objects belonging to a monument but presently located elsewhere, for example in a museum. The project’s activities will include both new digitization as well as the conversion of some existing 3D data into formats which are accessible for Europeana users. The project’s anticipated impact is making accessible through Europeana an unprecedented quantity of high-quality, 3D, well-organized and attractive information about the masterpieces of European architecture and archaeology.


Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP.2011.2.2

EAwareness: Europeana Awareness
EAwareness: Europeana Awareness

January 2012 (36 months)

Europeana Awareness is a Best Practice Network, led by the Europeana Foundation, designed to:

  • publicise Europeana to users, policy makers, politicians and cultural heritage organisations in every Member State so as to encourage the use and contribution of content, raise awareness of cultural heritage as an economic driver and promote knowledge transfer

  • promote its use by a broad public for a variety of purposes including recreation and hobbies, research, learning, genealogy and tourism – engaging users via user generation of content, creation of digital stories and social networking

  • develop new partnerships with 4 key sectors which are currently underexploited by Europeana: public libraries; local archival groups; broadcast organisations and open culture re-users (programmers, developers, researchers and activists) •    put in place new distribution channels for Europeana content working with the tourism sector

  • further encourage cultural institutions to continue to provide content in particular by: raising awareness of the opportunities provided by the new Europeana Licensing framework; developing mechanisms for collective rights management; and increasing the amount of content in Europeana that can be freely re-used.

A wide variety of media and channels, both online and offline, will be used to ensure promotion of appropriate and consistent messages to different stakeholder groups. The approaches to be used have been chosen so as d to align closely with the goals of the Europeana Strategic Plan 2011-15 and include both top-down and bottom –up activities. The 48 partner consortium brings together leading players with strong track records in the Europeana network in the areas of work to be undertaken, as well as some new players with specific expertise in areas such as PR, User Generated Content and cultural tourism. Every Member State is represented by a Country Partner who will have a key role in continuing the PR work kicked off by the EAwareness campaigns.


Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP.2011.2.3