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By Dimitra Papageorgiou, Nikos Ioannidis, Ioannis Christou, Michael Papathomas and Markellos Diorinos - July 2000
Dimitra Papageorgiou, Nikos Ioannidis, Ioannis Christou, Michael Papathomas and Markellos Diorinos discuss the ARCHEOGUIDE project [1]. The project aim is to develop a system that enhances the overall experience of a visitor to a cultural heritage site by providing an augmented reality (AR) reconstruction of the ruins of the site’s monuments. The system will act as a personalised guide providing multimedia and new media information to visitors. ARCHEOGUIDE takes into account visitor's personal preferences and continuously adapts the tour according to their interaction with the system. The authors give a brief description of the project, the way the system will be applied and its overall architecture [2].
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Europe is a major contributor to cultural heritage. Due to its long history it contains a large number of archeological sites, monuments and museums indicating its contribution to human civilization. Lots of people are visiting cultural heritage sites all around Europe [3], most of which cannot exhibit anything but ruins of the original site and therefore fail to transfer to visitors the true cultural function of the site. ARCHEOGUIDE is an Augmented Reality based system that will try to integrate cultural sites with 3D reconstructions and other multimedia information so that the original function of the site can be better communicated to visitors. ARCHEOGUIDE also permits the diversification of the visitors to be taken into account by allowing them to enter information about their personal preferences and then by continuously adapting the presented material to the user profile during the visit.
In order to provide this wealth of structured new-media information to the visitor, a rigorous database model will be developed that can serve both site visitors (for guided tours) and scientists, by providing complete and thorough site documentation.
Funded by the EU IST framework, the consortium consists of: Intracom S.A. (Greece), Fraunhofer Institute of Computer Graphics (IGD) (Germany), the Computer Graphics Centre (ZGDV) (Germany), the Centro de Computacao Graphica (CCG) (Portugal), A&C 2000 (Italy), Post Reality (Greece) and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture (Greece).
The project technical objectives are:
The business objectives of the project include:
The ARCHEOGIDE project will provide a new approach to visits in cultural heritage sites by overcoming the disadvantages that physical or virtual tours have.
In the case of traditional on-site tours the visitors are grouped and led around the grounds whilst all receiving the same pieces of information about the site. A small amount of interaction with the human guide is possible but the visitors all share the same tour; which has been constructed to be less specialized and general in order to meet the needs of a wide area of visitors. In fact it is well known that guided tours in cultural heritage sites often cause boredom because of their stiff, inflexible and generalized material and presentation.
Virtual reality guides in contrast are systems where the users experience a visit in a cultural site without being physically present. Instead they enter a virtual environment that represents the physical archaeological site along with 3D reconstructions of monuments. During the virtual tour they are presented with multimedia information about the site in response to choices made by them.
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| Figure 1. Augmented reality |
The ARCHEOGUIDE system is an augmented reality on-site guide. This means that it overlays virtual objects on to the physical environment of a cultural heritage site. In consequence, visitors will be able to be present in an archaeological site by carrying a mobile unit and wearing a see-through HMD (Head Mounted Display) with headphones, which will compose the natural environment by a 3D reconstruction of ruins and monuments. The mobile unit will be connected to a server that contains a database with the complete site documentation and models. The system will create a user profile at the beginning of the tour according to visitor’s personal features and will present to each user corresponding information selected from the server’s database. The visitor will then walk around the place directed by the system’s instructions in the same way they would follow a human guide. He/she will be able to interact with the system through a friendly interface by asking questions which will continually change the presentation to meet his/her interests.
The ARCHEOGUIDE project will aim to make visits to cultural heritage sites more interesting and compelling by allowing to view a reconstruction of the monuments as they actually were when built. Visitors will also follow an instructed tour, hearing information that is personalised, and have access to a large database containing site documentation including historical and scientific information.
The visitors will be provided with a mobile unit and a see-through HMD will be connected together as soon as they enter the site. The mobile unit will contain the information to be presented and the HMD will display the physical environment and 3D virtual objects. The HMD will be equipped with headphones through which audio information about the site will be presented. At the beginning of the tour the visitors will be asked to provide personal information about themselves, such as age, education, special interests etc. so that the system can construct a profile. According to that profile a list of predefined-tours will be suggested to the user and he/she will make a choice or modify the predefined tour meeting his/her preferences. The path the visitor will follow will be drawn up by ARCHEOGUIDE detailing the monuments and route the tour will take. The visitor will be able to add/delete objects from that tour and receive information only on subjects that interest him/her. The information presented about each individual object will also depend on the user’s profile; for example different information will be available for a child than for an adult.
The visitor will then follow the system’s instructions in order to visit the site. The site will be divided into areas and sub areas with relevant spatial content. The tour will begin by giving general information about the areas and then will continue by concentrating on each individual monument. 3D reconstructions of objects and multimedia information will be displayed in the visitor’s HMD.
The visitor will be able to interact with the system during the tour by asking questions which will in turn update the tour. The user will be able to ask for more information about certain subjects, choose an object of interest about which he/she requires presentation and stop/pause/resume the presentation through a user-friendly interface. More advanced search capabilities will also be available allowing the user to find cultural information about monuments, historic events, scientific aspects and any information related to a monument, subject, historic period.
It is the unique structure and organisation of the tour that allows a consistent and coherent story to be presented during the tour whilst preserving personalization. A tour consists of a number of "scripts", one for each area of the tour. Each script is an ordered array of multimedia objects to be presented. A multimedia object may be an image, a 3D model, an audio file containing information about an object or a monument or a combination of the above. However, the script may also contain "expandable multimedia objects" which can be thought of as abstract objects having many derived implementations. Two different visitors who have selected the same tour will be presented with different multimedia information according to their individual preferences stated at the beginning of the tour. This structure allows both consistency and coherency throughout the tour because the core of the tour remains unchanged (and un-restructured), but also allows flexibility and personalization by providing different content (focusing on different aspects or topics) at key points of the tour selected by the content creator or curator. In a sense, this structure resembles a web page containing multimedia information and instantly expanding hyperlinks that contain different information for each visitor.
The system architecture is illustrated below:
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| Figure 2. ARCHEOGUIDE Overall Architecture |
The system consists of the following:
The ARCHEOGUIDE system is based on client/server architecture which includes a Site Information server containing the Database that holds complete scientific documentation of the site, the spatial information, the 3D representations of objects and the audio-visual presentations targeting the visitors.
The mobile units are portable computers with a see-through HMD (Head Mounted Display) equipped with a camera and speaker. The HMD augments the real scene received by the camera with the virtual representations of objects and presents the audio information. The mobile units will maintain a local database that will store a subset of the site information pertaining to a particular area of the site for a particular user and visit profile. As the user moves around the site the mobile units communicate with the site information server to download information relevant to the new area of the site the user has entered.
The mobile units communicate with the site information server through a wireless network. The wireless network will consist of small number of access points transferring database information from the server to the client (mobile unit). Wireless LANs use radio frequency (RF) technology to transmit and receive data over the air, avoiding the need for wired connections. In a typical wireless LAN configuration a transmitter/receiver (transceiver) device called an access point, connects to the wired network. At a minimum, the access point receives, buffers, and transmits data between the wireless LAN and the wired network infrastructure. A single access point can support a small group of users ranging from 15-50.
The mobile unit also contains a position and orientation tracking system. A Global Positioning System (GPS) will be used as a first order position tracker, feeding a much more advanced image based position and orientation tracking system that will search for recognizable landmarks in the image provided by the user camera. The GPS will serve two purposes: to restrict the number of recognizable landmarks the system searches for in the camera image, and to maintain at least an approximate position tracking information at all times. The position tracking system of a user will transmit I/O requests to the server whenever it determines that the visitor is moving to an area about which there is no information in the local database of the computer of the Mobile Unit.
ARCHEOGUIDE is a research project pursued by a consortium of European organisations that are funded by the European Union IST framework. The system will fuse together a number of diverse cutting edge technologies such as augmented reality, multi-modal user interaction, multimedia databases and geographic information systems, distributed OO computing, and machine learning in order for visitors of cultural heritage sites to have a completely new experience. It will be an adaptive, interactive personalized tour of the site that will excite all major human senses. The first installation site of this project will be ancient Olympia in Greece, the birthplace of the Olympic games and from where the Olympic light begins its journey to the host city of the games every four years. Bearing in mind that the Olympic games in 2004 will take place in Athens, Greece, the importance of this system becomes even greater.
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Dimitra Papageorgiou, Nikos
Ioannidis, Ioannis Christou,
Michael Papathomas and Markellos
Diorinos
Development Programmes Dept.
Intracom S.A.
Peania, Greece
nioa@intranet.gr
Dimitra Papageorgiou, Software Engineer works in the software development of ARCHEOGUIDE project
Nikos Ioannidis, Deputy Manager of the Development Programs Department is the overall manager of the ARCHEOGUIDE project.
Dr. Ioannis Christou, Project Coordinator is responsible for the design and integration of ARCHEOGUIDE project.
Dr. Michael Papathomas, was responsible for writing the initial proposal of the project.
Markellos Diorinos, Software Engineer works in the software development of the project.
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For citation purposes:
Papageorgiou,D. Ioannidis,N. Christou,I. Papathomas,M. & Diorinos,M. "ARCHEOGUIDE: An Augmented Reality based System for Personalized Tours in Cultural Heritage Sites.", Cultivate Interactive, issue
1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/archeo/>
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By Paul Allen, Roberto Vaccaro and Gert Presutti - July 2000
This article focuses on the description of the objectives of the ARTISTE project (for "An integrated Art Analysis and Navigation environment") that aims at building a tool for the intelligent retrieval and indexing of high resolution images.
European museums and galleries are rich in cultural treasures but public access has not reached its full potential. Digital multimedia can address these issues and expand the accessible collections. However, there is a lack of systems and techniques to support both professional and citizen access to these collections.
The ARTISTE project will address professional users in the fine arts as the primary end-user base. These users provide services for the ultimate end-user, the citizen.
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The possibility of an easy and effective management of large data repository is a strategic objective for many enterprises. This field of research is of particular interest to the market, as the availability of large repositories of electronic data is increasing and the industrial interest to solve the problem of automated content-based indexing and retrieval of images is high [1].
European museums and galleries are rich in cultural treasures but public access to masterpieces for education, leisure or work purposes has not reached its full potential. Automation of the indexing, retrieval and delivery of such assets over the web would help to address these issues and expand the accessibility of collections, broadening public awareness of the European cultural heritage, which lies behind them. To date, however, there has been a lack of systems and techniques to provide effective remote access to these collections [2],[3],[4].
New technology is now being developed that will transform that situation. A European consortium, partly funded by the EU under the fifth R&D framework, is working to produce a new management system for visual information.
Four major European galleries (The Uffizi in Florence, The National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Louvre related restoration centre, Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France) are involved in the project. They will be joining forces with NCR, a leading player in database and Data Warehouse technology; Interactive Labs, the new media design and development facility of Italy's leading art publishing group, Giunti; IT Innovation, Web-based system developers; and the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Together they will create web based applications and tools [5] for the automatic indexing and retrieval of high-resolution art images by pictorial content and information.
The 2.7 million Euro project called ARTISTE (An integrated Art Analysis and Navigation Environment) will take two and a half years to complete. It will give providers, publishers, distributors, rights protectors and end users of art images information, as well as the multi-media information market as a whole, a more efficient system for storing, classifying, linking, matching and retrieving art images. The system will be used in publishing, collection management, decision taking and life long training applications in the on-line information society of the new millennium.
The areas of innovation in this project are as follows:
The project represents a radical departure in terms of indexing works of art. Attempts have been made to index the objects and subjects in paintings using ordered systems, but these rely on expert knowledge of the content and in-depth experience of the classification system. The ARTISTE approach will use the power of object-related databases and content-retrieval to enable indexing to be made dynamically, by non-experts.
The high quality of images in the system, particularly in terms of colour, will allow comparisons to be made that in the past were based on information of too low a quality to support the assertions made. Comparisons made using the shadow data will allow comparison of brush strokes, etc.
Not much research has been carried out worldwide on new algorithms for style-matching in art. This is probably not a major aim in Artiste but could be a spin-off if the algorithms made for specific author search requirements happen to provide data which can be combined with other data to help classify styles.
In terms of colour matching all previous work has been non-colorimetric, i.e. varied RGB colour comparisons. The ARTISTE approach will use the unique collection of CIE colour values from the Vasari/Marc projects to carry out accurate colour comparisons. Preliminary work at UOS MMRG in this area shows that one can even begin to match reconstructed spectra with pure pigment spectra. The ability to put a colour value from say a colour meter reading of a pure known pigment in as a query to obtain a search across a collection would to ARTISTE. With similarly accurate collections such as those in the Uffizi gallery it is also possible to allow authors to find comparisons between collections, which were just not possible with non-calibrated images. NGL's fading data can also be used to provide clues about matching to colours before 100 years of light fading for example. This could help in cases such as textile/fabric sample matching.
Based on experience from working with art historians and art gallery professionals for 10 years UOS MMRG is aware of requirements in retrieval of art, rather than classification. In other words ARTISTE would aim to give searchers tools which hint at links due to say colour or brush-stroke texture rather than saying "this is the automatically classified data". Also by concentrating on specific examples such as fabric finding, pigment finding, specific shapes etc., we are producing new research results rather than trying to satisfy a huge array of users, which has been shown to be the weakest approach in content-based retrieval.
The ARTISTE project will build on and exploit the indexing scheme proposed by the AQUARELLE consortia. The ARTISTE project solution will have a core component that is compatible with existing standards such as Z39.50. The solution will make use of emerging technical standards XML, RDF and X-Link to extend existing library standards to a more dynamic and flexible metadata system. The ARTISTE project will actively track and make use of existing terminology resources such as the Getty "Art and Architecture Thesaurus" (AAT) and the "Union List of Artist Names" (ULAN).
ARTISTE will integrate art collections while allowing the owners of each collection to maintain ownership and control of their data. This will be achieved by virtually integrating the collections using the concept of distributed linking. The distributed linking will add links to content (both text and images) at presentation time. This will enable a user to add links to content that they do not own or have write access to.
Distributed links will ease the management of links by separating them from the content. This means that new links can be applied to an existing resource without modification to that resource (for example when a new image content analysis algorithm has been performed on the data set). In addition, different sets of links can be applied depending on the user viewing the resource.
The proposed architecture will allow multiple distributed databases to be integrated, removing the need for centralised repositories. However, as volumes are expected to exceed a terabyte, ARTISTE will use scalable object-relational database technology to manage these large data volumes.
Figure 1 shows the envisaged architecture for a fully implemented system.
Representations of the works of art are held in the object relational database as user defined modules (UDM). These UDMs define both the representations of the art and the functions that can be applied to these representations. These functions will include image processing and recognition techniques such as icon and painting technique detection. Hierarchical storage using disks and DVD technology will be used to store the images, as appropriate.
Metadata will also be stored in a database. This may be stored in the same object-relational database, or in a separate database, according to the incumbent systems at the user partners.
RDF provides for metadata definition through the use of schemas. Schemas define the relevant metadata terms (the namespace) and the associated semantics. Individual RDF queries and statements may use multiple schemas. The system will make use of existing schemas such as the Dublin Core schema and will provide wrappers for existing resources such as the Art and Architecture thesaurus in a RDF schema wrapper.
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| Figure 1: Artiste architecture |
The Distributed Query and Metadata Layer will provide a single interface to the art and its metadata. This layer will accept RDF queries and retrieve the relevant art document, either by formulating and executing a content-analysis SQL query in real-time, or by querying the metadata database using the common metadata schemas as necessary. The layer will map the RDF metadata namespace on to the metadata representation within the database. This mapping may be different for different galleries.
The Distributed Query and Metadata Layer will also provide facilities to enable queries to be directed towards multiple distributed databases. The end user will be able to seamlessly search the combined art collection. This layer will adhere to worldwide digital library standards such as Z39.50, augmenting and extending as necessary to allow the richness of metadata enabled by the RDF standard.
The presentation layer will provide the navigation facilities. Links will be added in real-time to the images, which is retrieved from the database, either through a local copy of the authored links database or through automatic generation from the metadata repository.
It will be possible to display the images in a standard Web browser. Use will be made of Java applets where necessary.
In conclusion the Artiste project will result into an interesting and innovative system for the art analysis, indexing storage and navigation. The actual state of the art of content-based retrieval systems will be positively influenced by the development of the Artiste project, which will pursue the following goals:
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Paul Allen
IT Innovation Centre
2 Venture Road
Chilworth Science Park
Southampton
England
SO16 7NP
United Kingdom
<pja@it-innovation.soton.ac.uk>
<http://www.it-innovation.soton.ac.uk>
Phone: +44 (23) 8076 0834
Roberto Vaccaro
Giunti Interactive Labs
Giunti Interactive Labs S.r.l
via al Ponte Calvi, 3/15
16124 Genova
Italy
<r.vaccaro@giuntilabs.it>
<http://www.giuntilabs.com/>
Phone: +39 (010) 2465178
Gert Presutti
NCR SE-Copenhagen
Vibevej 20
2400 Copenhagen NV
Denmark
<Gert.Presutti@NCR.COM>
<http://www.NCR.dk/SE-Copenhagen/>
Phone: +45 (38) 15 75 47
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For citation purposes:
Allen, P. Vaccaro, R, & Presutti, G. "Artiste: An integrated Art Analysis and Navigation Environment",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/artiste/>
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By Jørgen Bøegh - July 2000
Jørgen Bøegh reports on the Virtual Control Room being developed in the IST project ASH (Access to Scientific Space Heritage). The Virtual Control Room will provide an exciting environment for young students to learn about space and astronomy by carrying out a simulated space mission built around the European Space Agency Rosetta mission to the comet Wirtanen.
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How did life come to Earth? Maybe Earth provided the right conditions for life to start spontaneously? Or maybe life came from somewhere else in the universe? We don’t know, but today most scientists believe that Earth is not the only planet in the universe where life exists. Scientists also think that there are links between the different ‘civilizations’. In other words, life is able to travel through the universe.
How can this be possible? A likely answer is that comets could be the carriers of life’s building blocks. If we are looking for traces of life outside the Earth the comets are therefore good places to look.
The ASH project will build a Virtual Control Room that makes it possible for school classes to plan and carry out virtual missions to a comet to look for traces of life. The students will play the roles of scientists, engineers, mission control managers etc., and they will experience the excitement of making new discoveries.
The inspiration for the Virtual Control Room comes from the Mission Control Center in Houston, which became famous in the sixties with the Apollo missions to the Moon. In these days people were fascinated with science and technology.
Much has changed since then. People are now much less concerned with technology. This also influences the young generation and can be seen by the serious lack of skilled engineers in Europe.
One of the aims of the ASH project is to provide a teaching environment that will fascinate school children and make them interested in becoming engineers or scientists.
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| Figure 1: View of the ASH Virtual Control Room |
The Virtual Control Room will look somewhat similar to a real mission control center. There will be different work places where specific mission tasks can be controlled and managed. For pedagogical reasons these work places are grouped in islands. This makes the Virtual Control Room concept flexible. It will be possible to assign different responsibilities to the different islands or all islands can be assigned the same task and working in parallel. It will be easy to add more islands depending on the number of students to be accommodated for each mission. A big screen in front of the islands will provide a common view for all students as well as serving as a working space for special experiments.
Groups of students must work together in their search for traces of life on a comet. The students must identify the comet and calculate its orbit, select a set of experiments, calculate the optimal orbit of the spacecraft, launch the mission, travel through space to reach the comet, find a good landing spot, carry out the planned experiments, and finally draw the conclusions from their experiments: Are there any traces of life on the comet?
The Virtual Control Room will be based on the following principles:
The inspiration of the mission to be implemented in the ASH project comes from the ESA mission Rosetta. The Rosetta mission will be launched on 21 January 2003. The spacecraft will make a nearly ten years roundabout before it reaches its target. On its way it will pass the asteroids Otawara and Siwa. It will pass Mars in August 2005, come back to Earth in 2005 and 2007, and finally reach the comet Wirtanen in 2011. This complicated orbit takes advantage of the gravity of Earth and Mars to give the spacecraft the necessary energy to reach the comet.
The Rosetta mission is very interesting from a teaching perspective. It is an exciting mission searching for traces of life, it includes many facets of space exploration and astronomy, and it can illustrate topics from mathematics, physics, biology, geology and so on. The concepts of time and space will be covered and an understanding of life and its building blocks is fundamental.
Furthermore, the Rosetta mission is a European mission, thereby emphasizing the European achievements in space science and astronomy. Hence, the ASH project aims to establish close links to both ESA and ESO.
The ASH project consortium has the expertise needed for developing the Virtual Control Room. Three partners, EuroPlanetarium, Royal Observatory, and Tycho Brahe Planetarium are responsible for planning and developing the mission. Three other partners, DELTA Danish Electronics, Light & Acoustics (project coordinator), Space Application Services, and the Technical University Vienna will design and implement the distributed system architecture, simulation models and advanced 3D user interface of the Virtual Control Room.
The ASH project started on 1 January 2000 and will run for two years. The project aims to involve all interested parties by organizing a series of user workshops. The first user workshop took place in May. This workshop focused on user requirements. The second user workshop is scheduled for the beginning of 2001. This workshop will focus on feedback to the system design and pedagogical aspects of the mission. Anybody interested in participating should contact a project representative in order to get an invitation.
The ASH project provides a new approach to increasing students awareness and appreciation about space and astronomy. The Virtual Control Room offers an exciting environment for learning about space by conducting a simulated mission to a comet searching for traces of life. The application of multimedia technology gives a feeling of realism and heightens the intensity of the experience. The Rosetta mission is targeted at high school level students but the Virtual Control Room concept could be used in many other applications.
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Jørgen Bøegh
DELTA Danish Electronics
Light &
Acoustics
Venlighedsvej 4, DK-2970 Hørsholm, Denmark
jb@delta.dk
<http://www.delta.dk>
Phone: +45 45 86 77 22
Jørgen Bøegh is employed at DELTA. He is the project manager of the ASH project. Previously he was responsible for the development of a collaborative virtual educational environment as part of the ACTS project Prospect. He has participated in and managed several other research projects. He is the head of the Danish delegation to ISO/IEC JTC1 SC7. He is the author of several papers and a book on object oriented software development.
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For citation purposes:
Bøegh, J. "The ASH project: A Virtual Control Room",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/ash/>
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By Carol Peters & Costantino Thanos - July 2000
The DELOS Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries aims at providing an open context in which an international agenda for future research in the digital libraries domain can be developed and continuously updated. Through a set of targeted activities, the Network will constitute a reference point for all DL projects funded by the 5th FP-IST, facilitating the exchange of experiences and know-how in this multidisciplinary domain, and will also establish close contacts with relevant application communities.
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Digital libraries represent a new infrastructure, created by the integration and use of computing, communications, and digital content on a worldwide scale [1]. They thus constitute the ideal vehicle for the storage, organisation, and sharing of knowledge in the global information society. There has been a rapid development of digital library technologies over the last few years. The digital library increasingly provides not just digitized text but also images, audio and video documents. This is due to the recent advances in storage capabilities for multimedia data that have made feasible the digital archiving of vast amounts of information from heterogeneous and distributed sources. It is now necessary to study and develop the most efficient tools to access and manipulate this information. For this reason, digital library technologies are now receiving increasing attention from both the research and application communities.
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| Figure 1: The Terrace of Lions on DELOS island, Greece |
However, the digital library must not be seen as merely an infrastructure to support a digitized collection of information objects together with a set of information management tools. It is an environment that brings together collections, services, and people in support of the full cycle of creation, dissemination, use, and preservation of data, information, and knowledge. The digital library domain is thus an essentially a complex multidisciplinary area covering a range of research topics including interoperability, metadata, information access, multilinguality, intellectual property rights, economic charging mechanisms, preservation and security issues. The challenges and opportunities that motivate advanced digital library initiatives are associated with this broad view of the digital library environment.
The DELOS Working Group, 1996-1999, funded by the ESPRIT LTR programme, was instrumental in promoting this view of the Digital Library and in organizing research and dissemination activities in the DL domain.
The objectives of the Working Group were to stimulate research activities in areas that are relevant for the efficient and cost-effective development of digital library systems, to encourage collaboration between research teams working in the field of digital libraries, to create links with on-going projects and activities in the field of digital libraries in industry and other public and private institutions, to build fruitful collaborations with the US DL research community, and to contribute to the creation of a European digital library research community. Through these activities, during its lifetime, DELOS became a point of reference for the European DL research community and a credible interlocutor with the US DL research community. In addition, the Working Group also involved a number of application communities in its activities. In many areas, such as electronic publishing, libraries, health care, cultural heritage, entertainment, protection of the environment, education, etc., the awareness has grown that the building of very large heterogeneous digital information repositories, accessible through global information infrastructures requires a considerable R&D effort in the digital library domain. Thus, we now have an application and industrial context that favours scientific and technological developments.
The DELOS Network of Excellence (NoE) for Digital Libraries [2] aims at both continuing and extending the activities of the DELOS Working Group. Its main objectives are:
An important feature of the Network of Excellence is its openness. All activities will be open to the European Digital Library research world and the relevant application communities (electronic publishing, libraries, cultural heritage, archives, etc). Links with the other DL research communities in the world will also be created. The network will be organised in a series of forums.
This activity will essentially have the objective of stimulating and coordinating actions aiming at the advancement of research in the digital library domain as well as at the improvement of the scientific collaboration between European research teams working in this area. The following mechanisms will be adopted: (i) a thematic workshop series, (ii) European conferences on Digital Libraries, and (iii) an international research exchange programme.
Thematic Workshop series
This series of workshops will give the opportunity to European researchers to present results of on-going research activities and to exchange opinions and experiences in an informal friendly environment. Position papers, progress reports on on-going projects and demos of running prototypes will constitute the main form of communication in these workshops. The expected spin-offs of these workshops will be i) useful cross-fertilization and ii) joint projects and research activities between European research teams.
The first Workshop in this series is scheduled for Autumn 2000 and will be on “Complex Queries and Relevance Feedback in Digital Libraries”. A number of proposals for future workshops have been submitted and are currently under consideration. These include: Heterogeneous DL Interoperability and Mediation; Personalization; Digital Libraries in the Educational System.
European Conference on Digital Libraries
The Network will support the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) series. This series of conferences was initiated by the DELOS WG in 1997. It is intended to give researchers from universities, research centers, industry and government the opportunity to meet once a year to discuss evolving research issues and applications. In particular its objectives are: to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines whose science relates to the development of digital libraries; to provide an opportunity for these scientists to form a research community in Europe specific to digital library development and to enable them to discuss issues and strategies specific to the European context; to enable review and discussion of research under way in Europe, in the US and in other parts of the world on digital libraries; to stimulate researchers, especially young scientists, to explore new areas of interest in digital library development; to establish a forum for the discussion of issues specific to Europe such as interoperability, multilinguality and intellectual property policy and information commerce. ECDL will establish cooperative links with the two major US DL conferences (ACM Digital Library Conference and the IEEE Advanced Digital Libraries Conferences) in order to coordinate their efforts and organize joint scientific events. ECDL 2000 [3] will be held in Lisbon, Portugal, 18-20 September.
International Research Exchange Programme
An International Research Exchange Programme will be promoted and implemented. The digital library is an interdisciplinary area and progress in this domain will require well-coordinated interdisciplinary skills and cooperation. Research exchanges, therefore, are of particular importance. ERCIM, the coordinator of the NoE, has a successful tradition in organizing and coordinating interdisciplinary research cooperation and in providing a flexible platform for international exchange in research and development. The standard form of research exchange is that of scientific visits between members of research groups. Such exchanges will involve Ph.D students, post-doc, and accomplished researchers. Financial support for this activity will be sought from the “Marie Curie” fellowship programme.
Evaluation in the context of a digital library means defining new metrics for components and new combinations of components in order to measure all sorts of performance aspects related to interoperability, metadata and resource discovery, and multilingual accesses. To achieve this objective the NoE will promote the building of publicly available reusable evaluation infrastructures. Two different testbeds are being created, maintained and operated: (i) a digital library test suite and (ii) a cross-language system evaluation infrastructure.
Digital Library Test Suite
A Digital Library Test Suite will be built up with the aim of accelerating and enhancing research into digital libraries. Such research needs large testbeds to evaluate and demonstrate new concepts. In recent and coming years, several excellent collections have been/will be created with EU funding. To maximize the benefit of this work and in collaboration with their owners, the DELOS NoE will undertake the task of promoting the creation, maintenance and operation of a Test Suite which will make such testbeds available to other researchers. This action will improve the efficiency of research since the Test Suite will provide all researchers with readily available resources for testing purposes. Research results are most valuable when they are compared with other approaches and validated against many sets of data. Because of the lack of suitable testbeds, most digital library projects only test their research prototypes against their own testbeds, thus making methods difficult to compare. The Test Suite will provide collections for comparative and quantitative experiments. It is planned to link this activity with the US D-Lib Working Group on Digital Library Metrics [4] and the D-Lib Test Suite initiative [5] coordinated by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). So far, this initiative makes five testbeds available developed by: Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, University of California – Berkeley, University of California – Santa Barbara, University of Illinois. Contacts between the DELOS NoE and CNRI have already been established.
Cross-Language System Evaluation Infrastructure
Until very recently, the international information networks were dominated by the English language. The situation is now in rapid evolution and the volumes of information available over the global networks in languages other than English is increasing much faster than for English. The user community of such knowledge sources is thus creating enormous pressure for the development of systems that provide access to information without language or cultural barriers. For these reasons, Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) is a key topic for the Digital Library domain. However, the development of CLIR systems implies the need for suitable methodologies and tools to evaluate system performance.
In collaboration with the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) series organized by NIST (the US National Institute for Standards) for the evaluation of different types of information retrieval systems, the DELOS NoE has set up a Cross Language Evaluation Forum [6] for the study and discussion of multiple language information access technologies and for cross-language system evaluation. This activity and the methodology adopted is discussed in reference [7]. The results of the first evaluation campaign will be presented at a Workshop organised in conjunction with ECDL 2000, in Lisbon, Portugal, 21-22 September.
A number of emerging Web standards will provide much of the basic architecture for digital libraries (RDF, Dublin Core, INDECS, DIENST protocol, UNICODE, XML, Z39.50, etc.). Many of these standards have just begun to move from research to deployment. Implementers will need to follow the progress of research, while researchers will need to monitor the experience of early adopters. The refinement of a stable architecture for digital libraries will require several iterations as these standards are adapted for various applications. The Standardisation Forum of the DELOS NoE is currently planning to focus on issues related to the deployment of standard metadata schemas and of related infrastructures for publishing, registering, and cross-linking application schemas based on standards.
One (or two) DELOS working groups will examine the relation between standards for high-level resource description, such as Dublin Core, and standards for fine-grained description within specialised applications, and how multiple standards can be used in combination to address the unique needs of applications. This issue will be the focus of a metadata workshop organised by the Standardisation Forum at an EC concertation event presenting projects sponsored by the Digital Heritage and Cultural Content programme, in Vienna, 30 June, 2000 [8].
The training and technology transfer actions which will be undertaken by the DELOS NoE aim at convincing European organizations of the effectiveness and benefits of the employment of digital library technologies within industrial/commercial environments. It is widely accepted that the lack of a quick and wide-spread “take-up” of new technologies is one of the major problems of Europe, compared with other continents. The DELOS NoE will disseminate information on its activities not only to the research world, but also to the relevant application and industrial communities and will also undertake the following take-up measures.
International Summer School
Summer Schools will be oraginised focussing on the state-of-the-art in selected DL technologies. The schools will be directed towards members of the research community (in the wide sense): primarily graduate students, but also young researchers and professionals involved in R&D in DL- related areas. The first school will be directed by Professor Hans Roosendaal, University of Twente, the Netherlands, and is scheduled for summer 2001.
Training
A training programme will be organized which will consist of specific technology transfer courses in selected application domains. These courses will present digital library technologies and successful case studies in a customized manner to user communities. They must be focused on specific application/commercial environments, on their demonstrative mission, and on their window of opportunity. The aim should be to organise 2-3 tutorials per year, generally in conjunction with annual events of relevant associations (e.g. IFLA – International Federation of Librarians; FIAT/IFTA - The International Federation of Television Archives, etc.)
DLs are inherently distributed, which is part of their appeal, and it is crucial to share aspects such as standards to ensure that the functions a digital library provides are useful in a global, multi-lingual, and multi-cultural environment. The NoE will seek to establish collaborative actions with other research communities. In particular, collaborations already established by the DELOS WG (with the US, Russian, and Japanese DL research communities) will be reinforced and extended to include other countries (for ex. the countries of the Mediterranean area) with which an agreement for scientific cooperation under the 5th Framework was defined by the European Union. Three forms of cooperation are envisioned:
The DELOS-US Collaboration aims at
The DELOS-Russian Collaboration aims at
The DELOS Collaboration with non-EU Mediterranean countries aims at
The first specific activity will be a Workshop to be held at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane in November 2000. Participants will be experts from the NoE who will present the state of the art in key DL areas (e.g. interoperability, metadata, multilinguality) and scientists from non-EU Mediterranean countries already working in DL-related fields. A major objective of the workshop will be to evaluate the possibilities of establishing collaborations between EC-funded groups and partners from this area and to identify the key issues for such collaborations
The DELOS Collaboration with Japan, Canada and South America aims at
In order to guarantee that the objectives of the Network will be successfully achieved, an assessment activity will be carried out during the Network’s life cycle. This activity will be performed by an external body, the NoE International Advisory Board. The main tasks of the Advisory Board will be the assessment of the results achieved by DELOS during the past year and the approval of a detailed specification of the Network’s activities for the following year.
For more information on the activities of the DELOS Network of Excellence, see the Web site or contact the Network Director: Costantino Thanos [11].
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Carol Peters
Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione
CNR
Pisa
Italy
carol@iei.pi.cnr.it
<http://www.iei.pi.cnr.it>
Phone: +39 050 3152897
Costantino Thanos
Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione
CNR
Pisa
Italy
thanos@iei.pi.cnr.it
<http://www.iei.pi.cnr.it>
Phone: +39 050 3152910
Costantino Thanos is Head of the Information Engineering Dept. of the Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione - an Institute of the Italian National Research Council in Pisa. He has been/is coordinator of a number of EC projects in the digital library or related areas currently including ECHO: European Chronicles On-line, a DL of film archives, and SCHOLNET, a DL service for a scholarly community. He was the Coordinator of the DELOS Working Group and is Director of the DELOS Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries.
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For citation purposes:
Peters, P. & Thanos, C. "DELOS: A Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/delos/>
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By Pasquale Savino and Costantino Thanos - July 2000
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Wide access to large information collections is of great potential importance in many aspects - economic, environmental, health, cultural, social, etc. - of everyday life. However, limitations in information and communication technologies have, so far, prevented the average person from taking much advantage of existing resources. Humanity, in its continuous evolution, has accumulated an enormous quantity of information, knowledge, experience, art treasures, etc. One only has to think of the art treasures contained in our archives, libraries and museums, or of the immense and precious collections of observational data in the areas of space exploration, earth sciences, the environment, medicine, etc. accumulated during the last century. A huge amount of material has also been produced as video material. Most European countries have national audiovisual archives holding historical documentaries produced during the twentieth century. Such material is extremely precious from a historical and cultural viewpoint.
The ECHO project aims at developing a Digital Library (DL) service for historical films belonging to large national audiovisual archives. Actually being able to see and hear an account of a historical event, filmed in the original context, is very different from reading about it. The ECHO services will allow a user to search and access these documentary film collections. Users will be able, for example, to see an event which is documented in the country of origin and how the same event has been documented in other countries, or to investigate how different countries have documented a particular historical period of their life, etc. One effect of the emerging digital library environment, is that it frees users and collections from geographic constraints. This that we have to work across languages, cultures, international standards, etc.
The project involves a number of European institutions holding or managing unique collections of documentary films, dating from the beginning of the century until the seventies. These collections are of great value since they document the different aspects (social, cultural, political, economic) of life in European countries during this period of time. The set of services implemented by ECHO will provide users with access to significant portions of their cultural heritage which would otherwise be almost inaccessible.
The emergence of the networked information system environment allows us to envision digital library systems that transcend the limits of individual collections to embrace collections and services that are independent of both location and format. In such an environment, it is important to support the interoperability of distributed, heterogeneous digital collections and services. Achieving interoperability among digital libraries is facilitated by conformance to an open architecture as well as agreement on items such as formats, data types, and metadata conventions.
ECHO aims at developing a long term reusable software infrastructure and new metadata models for films in order to support the development of interoperable audiovisual digital libraries. In addition, the project aims at improving the accessibility, searchability, and usability of large historical audiovisual archives. Through the development of new models for film metadata, intelligent content-based searching and film-sequence retrieval, video abstracting tools, and appropriate user interfaces, the project intends to improve the accessibility, searchability, and usability of large distributed audiovisual collections. Through the implementation of multilingual services and cross language retrieval tools, the project intends to support users when accessing across linguistic, cultural and national boundaries. The ECHO system will be experimented, in the first place, for four national collections of documentary film archives (Dutch, French, Italian, Swiss). Other archives may be added in a later stage.
In order to render a digital library of this type feasible, the project has to solve the numerous technical problems that currently bar the inclusion of film information in the digital environment. The aim is to make the film collections available to as broad as possible range of users. To achieve this goal, the project will:
The Informedia Digital Video Library was funded by the first NSF/ARPA/NASA Digital Library Initiative (DLI) from 1994-1998, and was the only DLI project focusing on full-content indexing and retrieval of audio and video material.
Media Archive® is a content management system built with a client/server architecture. The Media Archive® client components form an integrated application suite supporting a continuous workflow in documentation, retrieval and reuse. The six Media Archive® client components support every stage of an archive workflow, from the acquisition of new content, through the creation of the metadata and the precise selection of content to be retrieved, to its provision for further processing,
One of the intellectual challenges of this project is that of evaluating the vast collections contained in the national film archives in order to make available online the most useful film elements, as perceived by a variety of user communities.
Another important aspect of the project will be the addition of a layer of metadata to the film archives. Metadata elements as presently defined do not describe film data well. The project will, thus, define a metadata model for film information. A semi-automatic process will be designed by which existing local catalogue records can be integrated with metadata elements, automatically extracted during the indexing/segmentation of the film material, into a common description, i.e., the common metadata model.
A collection service provides the mechanism for the aggregation of sets of digital objects into meaningful (from a given perspective) collections. Collections play an important role in the usability of a DL. The division of a DL into collections allows the application of collection-specific methods to improve discovery and access within those collections. Collection definition criteria are used to define which films are elements of which collections. The ECHO system will support a film collection service. Each ECHO collection could include films belonging to different content providers.
Design a multilingual user interface that provides functionality for accessing the ECHO collections independently of language.
Local site interfaces will be implemented in the local languages; however, a common user interface in English will also be maintained on the project Web-site for external access. Online cross-language search tools will be provided. Cross-language interrogation will be enabled by means of the employment of standard metadata formats, and via mechanisms which provide a mapping between the descriptive languages used by each partner.
The utility of the digital film library can be judged by the ability of the users to retrieve information they need easily and efficiently. The project will provide content-based searching and film-sequence retrieval. As the content is conveyed in both narrative (text and speech) and the image, a collaborative interaction of image, speech and language technology will be adopted in order to search the diverse film collections with satisfactory recall and precision. Three speech recognisers (Italian, French, and Dutch) will be built and integrated into the system architecture.
The project will develop techniques to produce visual summaries. The aim is to capture the content and structure of the underlying documentary film in a brief visual abstracting process. The summary will consist of a sequence of moving images, much shorter than the original film, but preserving the essence of the original message. It should provide a good overview of the entire film documentary.
In order to make a digital library of films possible, the copyright owners must be assured that their property will be properly protected and that its use will be measured in order to ensure them appropriate compensation. The project, therefore, will develop mechanisms which support the following functionality: access control, authentication, security, privacy, and billing.
 |
| Figure 1: System Overview |
Figure 1 provides an overview of main operations supported by the ECHO system. ECHO assist in the population of the digital library, through the use of mechanisms for the automatic extraction of content. Using a high-quality speech recogniser, the sound track of each video source is converted to a textual transcript, with varying word error rates. A language understanding system then analyses and organises the transcript and stores it in a full-text information retrieval system. Multiple speech recognition modules, for different European languages will be included. Likewise, image understanding techniques are used for segmenting video sequences by automatically locating boundaries of shots, scenes, and conversations. Metadata is then associated with film documentaries in order to complete their classification.
Search and retrieval via desktop computer and wide area networks is performed by expressing queries on the audio transcript, on metadata or by image similarity retrieval. Retrieved documentries or their abstract, are then presented to the user. By the collaborative interaction of image, speech and natural language understanding technology, the system compensates for problems of interpretation and search in the error-full and ambiguous data sets. Exploration of the ECHO library is based on these same techniques, allowing for spoken or typed natural language access to the information space.
The project will follow an incremental approach to system development. Three prototypes will be developed offering an increasing number of functionalities. The starting point of the project will be a software infrastructure resulting from an integration of the Informedia and Media Archive® technologies.
The ECHO partners can be divided into three categories: (i) content providers (documentary film collection holders), (ii) industrial partners and (iii) academic partners.
The ECHO content providers (Istituto Luce; Italy, Institut Nationale Audiovisuel, France;, Netherlands Audiovisual Archive, the Netherland, and Memoriav, Switzerland) own very large and precious audiovisual collections which document the different aspects of the life in their own countries during this century, starting from the twenties and continuing up to the sixties/seventies. The content providers will provide important input of the user expectations and requirements from a system of this kind. They will be responsible for selecting from their collections and, several sets of meaningful and interrelated collections of film footage. This will be indexed using the common metadata model defined by the project and made publicly available on the Web for demonstration purposes.
The industrial partners (Tecmath, EIT, and Mediasite) will develop and implement the global architecture of the ECHO system
There are two main academic partners (CNR and CMU) and four associate partners (CNRS-LIMSI, IRST, University of Twente, and University of Mannheim) with very specific tasks.
CNR-IEI, Pisa, an institute of the Italian National Research Council, is the project coordinator and is responsible for the overall technical management and system implementation and development.
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a top US research institution. It has developed the Informedia digital video library project as one of the six Digital Library Initiative (DLI) projects funded jointly by NSF, DAPRA and NASA. Its goal is to enable for video all the functionality and capability existing for textual information retrieval, while leveraging the temporal and visual qualities of video for richer information delivery. CMU will be responsible for the definition of the global system architecture and will be involved in the definition of the metadata model, and development and evaluation of the system prototypes. CNRS-LIMSI, IRST, University of Twente, and EIT will adapt and integrate speech recognition modules (for French, Italian, Dutch, and German) within the ECHO system and evaluate its performance. The University of Mannheim will adapt its video abstracting mechanism to the digital film context and integrate it within the ECHO system and evaluate its performance.
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Pasquale Savino
IEI-CNR
Via Alfieri, 1
56010 Ghezzano (PI)
Italy
P.Savino@iei.pi.cnr.it
<http://www.iei.pi.cnr.it/>
Phone: +39 050 315 2898
Pasquale Savino graduated in physics from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1980. From 1983 to 1995, he has worked at the Olivetti Research Labs in Pisa; since 1996, he has been a member of the research staff at the Information Engineering Dept. of the Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione - an Institute of the Italian National Research Council in Pisa, working in the area of multimedia information systems. He has participated and coordinated several CEC-funded research projects in the multimedia area.
Currently, he is involved in the EU-funded ECHO project, and he is the coordinator of the Italian National Research Council-funded Project "Museo Virtuale della Storia dell’ Informatica in Italia".
He has published scientific papers in many international journals and conferences in the areas of multimedia document retrieval and information retrieval.
His current research interests are multimedia information retrieval, multimedia content addressability, and indexing.
Costantino Thanos
IEI-CNR
Via Alfieri, 1
56010 Ghezzano (PI)
Italy
C.Thanos@iei.pi.cnr.it
<http://www.iei.pi.cnr.it/>
Phone: +39 050 315 2910
Costantino Thanos is Head of the Information Engineering Dept. of the Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione - an Institute of the Italian National Research Council in Pisa. He has been/is coordinator of a number of EC projects in the digital library or related areas currently including ECHO: European Chronicles On-line, a DL of film archives, and SCHOLNET, a DL service for a scholarly community. He was the Coordinator of the DELOS Working Group and is Director of the DELOS Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries.
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For citation purposes:
Savino, P. & Thanos, C. "ECHO - European CHronicles On-line",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/echo/>
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By Lesly Huxley - July 2000
Lesly Huxley reports on work in progress on the Renardus project, funded under the European Union's 'User-friendly Information Society' programme. Between January 2000-June 2002, Renardus partners aim to build an academic subject gateway service in Europe offering a single point of access on the Web ‘brokering’ to records held in existing national and subject-specific gateway initiatives Europe-wide. Read on to follow the fox’s progress.
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Many libraries and related organisations across Europe have been developing quality-controlled subject gateways for some years, with the aim of helping users in their target communities (mainly higher education learning and research) to find relevant, high quality resources on the Internet. Scalability is becoming a problem as the growth of the Internet increases. With continuing Internet expansion it is becoming clear that no single, publicly-funded subject gateway or national gateway initiative can hope to identify, evaluate, catalogue and organise all the Internet resources available to support the academic and research communities of Europe. The need to investigate different approaches is pressing.
The Renardus project’s aim is to build an academic subject gateway service for Europe by developing a system that will ‘broker’ data from a range of existing distributed gateways and other Internet-accessible collections across Europe. The broker service will offer a single point of access on the Web, allowing users to search and browse consistent views of data from the many existing, distributed quality-controlled and subject-based sources and then to ‘follow the fox’ to resources to support their learning and research.
The EU-funded DESIRE [1] project’s Information Gateways Handbook [2] addresses many technical, information and organisational issues relevant to single subject gateway services. The issues of bibliographic control on the Internet and the development of directories of national networked resources have been discussed in the COBRA [3] (COmputerised Bibliographic Record Actions) forum and the Conference of European National Libraries (CENL). In 1998, the Chair of CENL asked members to review approaches to information discovery provision within their own countries. To date, gateway services and initiatives have approached the issues of scalability within public funding in several ways. Services such as the DutchESS [4] subject guide, developed originally at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek [5] in The Netherlands (Renardus’ coordinating partner), have expanded with the collaborative commitment of seven university libraries. Nationally-funded subject gateways in the UK have come together within a collaborative framework (the Resource Discovery Network [6]): each gateway within the network has developed partnerships with others in similar subject areas to form ‘hubs’ [7], each comprising between two and four gateways.
However, despite these collaborations, the burden of maintaining high quality services becomes heavier as services grow, the resources 'pointed to' continue to change and users’ expectations are frustrated by the number of options available.
The Renardus project is a result of these shared experiences. The potential benefits from the proposed collaboration between participating subject and national gateways include scale economies in the areas of metadata creation, abstracting and indexing by service providers and a more sustainable level of quality in mediated resource discovery. Overall, access to scientific and cultural resources in Europe should be improved through aggregation and improved consistency of collections and a common understanding of academic users' needs. Participating services should also benefit from the collaborative framework in terms of improved sustainability and a stronger position against international competition.
The workplan of the project is scheduled to be carried out within a two and a half year time frame (1 January 2000-30 June 2002). The schedule is deliberately short to recognise the fast-changing developments in the work area and potential results from many related, parallel projects in the field. The work of the project is structured in two main strands: access to content and content sharing and building. Work in these strands is arranged in three main phases: Data Gathering and Research; Analysis and Design and Implementation. A third, complementary strand of Dissemination and Promotion runs through all three phases. The latter is intended to ensure full exploitation of - and continuing collaboration in - the fully-operational service and to facilitate information exchange between Renardus and related initiatives. The work is further divided into ten 'workpackages' with 18 public deliverables (six during the first six months of the project). The workpackages and their lead partners are listed in the table below:
Table 1: Renardus workpackages and lead partners
|
No: |
Title: |
Lead partner: |
|
1 |
Functional Model |
UK Office of Library and Information Networking (UKOLN), University of Bath, UK |
|
2 |
Design and Implementation |
Technical Knowledge Centre and Library of Denmark (DTV) |
|
3 |
Organisational Infrastructure |
Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) - National Library of the Netherlands |
|
4 |
Service Provision |
Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) - National Library of the Netherlands |
|
5 |
Verification and Evaluation |
Finnish Virtual Library Project/Jyväskylä University Library (JyU) |
|
6 |
Data Model and Data Flow |
Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen (SUB) |
|
7 |
Data Interoperability |
Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen (SUB) |
|
8 |
Business Issues |
UK Office of Library and Information Networking (UKOLN), University of Bath, UK |
|
9 |
Dissemination and Support |
Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), Bristol, UK |
|
10 |
Project Management |
Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) - National Library of the Netherlands |
Further details of the project partners and the participating gateways represented are available from the Renardus Web site [8] where you can also access full reports of all the completed deliverable work described in this paper.
Work in this phase of Renardus started in January 2000 and continues roughly for the first 12 months of the project in parallel with other phases. The first tasks for Renardus project partners were to:
The results of these tasks form the basis of the scoping document for the pilot service, the first draft of which is already available [9]. These tasks also feed into the Analysis and Design phase, particularly development of the functional specification, data model and architectural model.
The functional specification for the service to be developed during the Analysis and Design phase is based on user requirements collected at various levels. These include an investigation of potential participating services’ requirements in the areas of interoperability, interface and 'branding', led by the UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN [10]), University of Bath, UK.
The conclusion from the first part of the User Requirements for the Broker System [11] (a questionnaire completed by participating services early in 2000) concerns the architectural model. The respondents favoured a distributed model over a centralised solution. The concept of a central repository to which all metadata is routinely copied was rejected in favour of a centralised subject index that would forward the queries to relevant gateways. They also wanted Renardus to support Dublin Core [12] semantics and RDF [13] and XML [14] syntax for metadata records, with Z39.50 [15] and WHOIS++ [16] used as protocols for communication between Renardus and the brokered gateways. Support for both browse and search functions was high and providers also felt a need for mappings between metadata formats to support at least a consistent presentation of search results. Mappings between classification schemes are also needed so that the cross-browsing functionality can be implemented in the pilot system.
The second element of data gathering relating to user requirements focused on the collation of end users' evaluations of existing subject gateway services provided by project partners. Use case scenarios and activity diagrams have also been developed as part of the analysis work towards creation of a functional specification for the system.
Many existing gateways participating in the project had undertaken end user surveys in the past. To avoid duplication, the Renardus team led by the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen [17]: (SUB) collated results from these for an internal deliverable, Survey of End User Surveys [18] some of the material was provided by project partners, some was taken from publications produced by other projects. As different methods have been used to survey users, the results are by no means homogeneous. Also the numbers of respondents to each survey differed greatly (from about 10 to more than two hundred) and some of the surveys date back to 1996/1997 so that some of the results may possibly be outdated. Nevertheless, the results of the different user surveys provide basic information on user needs. Generally, these showed that users are more at ease with finding their way around in gateways and using the services they have to offer than is the case with the ‘rest’ of the Internet.
Users were found to appreciate quality resources: the evaluation and categorization of resources given by the subject gateways is of great importance to them. The currency of electronic data is also important. Searching is preferred to browsing. Generally, most people prefer the search option when looking for specific information and the browse option when looking for a wider range of information. A simple search is preferred to an advanced search option: searches with more than one keyword or with Boolean operators are rarely undertaken. Amongst the favourite search categories are keyword, author, title, and description.
The Renardus Evaluation of Existing Data Models [19] led by SUB provides an overview of the structures of Renardus partners' subject gateways. In response to questionnaires[20], the gateways provided details about their services, such as collection description, target group, resource categories, quality criteria, controlled vocabularies etc., as well as descriptions of their respective metadata sets. Based on these responses, a metadata mapping [21] has been drawn up in order to produce a first draft minimum common set of metadata elements (an overview of the usage of vocabularies [22] in Renardus gateways is also available). A first draft data model will inform design of and participation in the pilot service. A revised metadata set to be developed during the Analysis and Design phase will ultimately underpin requirements on services wanting to participate in the fully operational Renardus broker.
The review found that four of the participating gateways have metadata schemes based on IAFA/ROADS templates, two use individual schemes, and two use schemes based on Dublin Core [11]. As most of the partners use IAFA/ROADS as an exchange format there seems to be the possibility for a simple exchange of metadata. The data model will continue to be developed and refined as the pilot system is built and tested. The following elements currently form the basis of thinking on the minimum set: DC.Title; DC.Creator, DC.Description, DC.Identifier, DC.Subject, DC.Publisher, DC.Language, DC.Type, with further refinement based on DC qualifiers.
A range of ‘broker’ systems and models have come into existence in recent years, partly as a result of existing gateway services’ and other initiatives’ attempts to address issues of scalability without detriment to quality and usability. The challenge is to provide a service that integrates access to the diverse and distributed range of resources that may be valuable to users. The success of this integration is seen as beneficial both to digital libraries and their end users. Dempsey, Russell and Murray (1999, p.35) [23] recognise that users may often have to interact with a number of quite different information systems and interfaces in order to complete a full search. They suggest the development of an additional service layer - described as 'middleware' – which in the Renardus case is the broker service. Renardus partners, led by UKOLN, have undertaken a comprehensive Review of Existing Broker Models in Related Projects and Services [24], mapping these against the generic model known as the MODELS Information Architecture (MIA) [25]. At the same time as the review for Renardus was being compiled, a similar review was being undertaken for a project funded by the NSF/JISC International Digital Libraries Initiative - the IMesh [26] Toolkit project Some of these reviews have, with kind permission, been adapted and included in the Renardus review.
The data gathering and research phase of work has begun to inform the development of a functional specification for the Renardus broker and first drafts of the data model and data flow to inform its design. The Analysis and Design phase of the Renardus project started in May 2000 and continues throughout the project lifetime, firstly in development of the pilot service and subsequently the building of the fully operational Renardus broker.
Early tasks in this phase include an architectural model and data model for the pilot service.
The architectural design and technical implementation of the pilot system will be based on existing and emerging standards and technologies to ensure that the functionality of the operational broker service is extensible. Interaction of the broker with existing resource collections is to be carried out according to open standards, for example Z39.50. A range of existing models will be accommodated within the broker service: discussions have started on a first draft architectural model. A report on the proposed model is expected to be available on the Renardus Web site by July 2001.
Work on the data model is ongoing. The reports currently available from the Renardus Web site will be added to as discussions progress.
There are several ways you can ‘follow the fox’ and keep in touch with project progress and opportunities for participation in the fully-operational Renardus service. The task of disseminating project results is led by the Institute for Learning and Research Technology [27] and is being undertaken alongside the research and development work. The two main routes of dissemination are the Renardus Web site [8] and the Renardus News Digest [28], a regular email newsletter. Full reports of project findings are offered at the Web site as soon as they are available, together with descriptions of related projects and services [29]. You can also ‘follow the fox’ to conferences, workshops and other events.
Renardus partners are particularly keen to enter dialogue with other initiatives who may want to participate in the verification of the pilot service (through addition of at least one other service) or in the fully-operational broker service. Existing or emerging gateways and related initiatives interested in participating in the fully-operational Renardus service and/or in keeping up-to-date with the project’s work can sign up to receive a copy of the News Digest and visit the Web site. A workshop for potential participating services is to be held in September 2001. Identification of potential participants is underway and interested parties are asked to register an interest by submitting a message through the feedback form [30] on the Web site. User guidelines on data interoperability will be developed to facilitate participation in the Renardus broker service. These requirements will be drawn up during the Analysis and Design and Implementation phases based on some of the early work of the project described above and continuing work on technical standards and solutions, business and organisational issues.
Our work so far has supported our initial view that collaboration at a European level is both feasible and potentially beneficial both to service providers and end users alike. The collaborative framework emerging from the Renardus project will increase expertise in the provision of quality and sustainable subject-services within the many participating services. Strong collaborative impulses are already coming from the United States and Australia, trying to extend collaborative projects to Europe. Within the Renardus collaborative framework there is potential for positioning European participants more strongly on the international scene and putting them in an advantageous position to seek partners for international collaboration.
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Lesly Huxley
Manager: Renardus Dissemination and Support
Institute for Learning and Research Technology
University of Bristol
8-10 Berkeley Square
BRISTOL
BS8 1HH
United Kingdom
lesly.huxley@bristol.ac.uk
http://www.ilrt.bristol.ac.uk
Phone: +44 117 928 7196
Lesly Huxley leads the ILRT Renardus team responsible for dissemination and support for the project. Her other roles in the Institute include Training Manager for the Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG), Development Officer for Bized Virtual Worlds, Project Director for the Resource Guide for the Social Sciences and Staff Development Coordinator for the ILRT.
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For citation purposes:
Huxley, L "Renardus: follow the fox!", Cultivate Interactive, issue
1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/renardus/>
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By Bernard Smith - July 2000
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The 1st Call for Proposals in the new Information Society Technologies (IST) programme closed on June 16th 1999. IST is one of 4 new thematic programmes of the 5th Framework Programme (1998-2002) for research and technological development (RTD). In many ways this day represented the end of one era and the opening on another. Let us look at these changes in more detail:-
Focus: In moving from the 4th to the 5th Framework Programmes the Commission wanted to ensure a stronger sense of focus on a limited number of key challenges. One fundamental driver was to concentrate a critical mass of resources on a core set of issues of direct interest to Europe and its citizens. Underachievement in past programmes was felt to have been the results of a lack of real strategic focus and an inability to rapidly adapt to its changing surroundings. This approach resulted in the creation of 4 new thematic programmes and 3 horizontal programmes - the IST programme being one of the thematic programmes. Consolidation went far beyond the level of thematic programmes and resulted in the definition of only 23 Key Actions as compared to more than 70 such research domains in the old 4th Framework Programme.
In many ways the strongest sense of integration can be seen in the IST programme itself. The former Esprit, ACTS (Advanced Communication Technologies and Systems) and Telematics Applications Programme have been brought together to form the largest single thematic programme with a budget of 3.6 billion euro over the 5 year period 1998-2002. The IST programme has taken very seriously the idea that research is not an end in itself but must be directed towards basic socio-economic needs - job creation, economic growth, quality of life, and in support of the policy and goals of the European Union [1].
Content: Within the IST programme there is for the first time a clear place for content. The 3rd Key Action in the programme is entitled "Multimedia Content and Tools" and federates past actions in electronic publishing, cultural heritage, education and training and human language technologies. A substantial budget of 564 Meuro has been allocated to this Key Action. Management of this key action is concentrated within a single Directorate in Luxembourg (Information Society Directorate General - InfoSo D).
Cultural Heritage: For the first time cultural heritage has a permanent home within the European Commissions RTD programmes. Digital heritage and cultural content is now one of the main areas under Key Action III in the IST programme and will certainly benefit from a budget well in excess of 70 Meuro over the lifetime of the programme. The 5th Framework Programme decision is very explicit concerning the task of the RTD actions to be funded - it is to provide “access to scientific and cultural content through the networking of libraries, archives and museums". Clearly the aim must thus be to expand the contribution of libraries, museums and archives in the Information Society and to foster the emergence of a vibrant and dynamic culture economy in Europe. The unit responsible for the day-to-day activities in this domain is InfoSo D2 entitled "Cultural Heritage Applications" [2].
Another point that I feel must be stressed is the international co-operation aspects of the 5th Framework Programme. It is true that one of the horizontal programmes is specifically dedicated to international co-operation. However it is equally true to say that 30-31 States (the 15 EU Member States, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Israel, Switzerland (by 2001) and the 11 accession countries) can participate directly in the programme. There are also many scientific co-operation agreements signed with specific countries around the world (USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, etc) which provide an excellent formal instrument for collaboration on specific global objectives. To take the specific case of digital heritage and cultural content we have now signed a co-operation agreement with the US National Science Foundation (NSF) on Digital Libraries research. This has already been integrated into the 3rd Call and is likely to have a noticeable influence on one action line in the work programme for 2001.
The rest of this article will focus on this new sector of digital heritage and cultural content and its on-going activities in the IST programme.
Our mission is to help create, and make accessible a European cultural information landscape as part of the Information Society. We will do so by stimulating and supporting cultural memory organisations in research and development actions targeting the use of state-of-the-art technologies to provide innovative networked services. This means applying creative technology applications to open Europe's warehouses of cultural content.
This future European cultural information space must be rich in content and sustainable both as an infrastructure and in terms on the underpinning business models. It must be easy to identify, easy to access, and easy to navigate by all European citizens, whoever they maybe, wherever they maybe, and whenever they may require it. We must be aware of the fact that tomorrow's cultural content will be produced both by generating new forms of digital media as well as by implementing new ways to link and view existing cultural content. This includes experimenting with new levels of context and new ways to create personalised cultural information spaces. An inclusive landscape must encompass all cultural, scientific and industrial heritage in Europe.
Our goals are to help define and establish a framework for heritage information comprising agreed infrastructures, standards, methodologies, guidelines and diverse incentives for creating, collecting, linking, exchanging and using cultural and scientific content. Our actions must integrate into and supplement existing national, European and international initiatives. The key participants are Europe's memory institutions, both public and private, and with a particular focus on new alliances between them and with technology and communications providers.
Our first objective must thus be to focus on the core research problems that our cultural and scientific institutions are facing either as professional institutions or as public services. Our second objective must be to enhance the nature, quality and value of European heritage by providing substantial improved access to cultural and scientific resources. Our third objective is to produce a lasting “info-structure” of technologies, test-beds, guidelines, standards, new alliances, human and institutional networks, etc. that are of direct relevance and value to Europe's institutions.
So let us return to the 16th June 1999. At the end of that day 73 proposals had been received for the action line III.2.3 "Access to scientific and cultural heritage". This action line was designed to attract for the first time a collection of RTD proposals covering Europe's museum, libraries and archives collections. Those 73 proposals involved 619 different organisations and institutions asking for 133 Meuro funding.
It should not be forgotten that we are referring to only one action line of a total of 8 that were open in Key Action III in the 1st Call. The Key Action received a total of 578 proposals for a total requested funding of more than 1 billion euro. If we try to class the "hot" domains that emerged from this 1st Call for the entire Key Action III we can see the following:
The digital heritage and cultural content activities fell clearly under the digital libraries applications label. Returning to the results of the specific action line for cultural and scientific heritage, and after concluding the evaluation, selection and negotiation processes this action line has produced 11 RTD projects and 2 support measures. In these projects more than 130 different organisations and institutions are involved and the funding provided by the Commission totals 19.8 Meuro. These projects typically receive an average funding of 1.7 Meuro, include 8 partners and involve a total average effort per project of 310 person-months. It is certainly impressive to note that the results of this call alone is bring more than 320 person-years to bear on a core number of important RTD issues.
The results of this action line concentrate on the development of technologies that support what can be called in the broadest sense 'next generation Digital Libraries applications'. Key issues in the projects launched from the 1st Call are:
Additional information on the projects selected under the 1st Call can be found on the Cordis web site [3].
It is worth mentioning here that one of the two support measures selected from this 1st Call is the Cultivate project. I take this opportunity to wish this journal a successful launch and hope that it can build on the solid foundations laid by the exploit interactive journal [4].
Even before the ink was dry on some of the contracts from the 1st Call we were evaluating the results of the 2nd Call for the IST Programme. This time the focus was action line III.2.4 entitled "Digital preservation of cultural heritage". Our objectives in this 2nd Call were to add to our fledging Digital Library portfolio and to launch some virtual representations experiments. The key issues were:
and lastly
In this 2nd Call, which closed on 17 January 2000, we received another 68 proposals bring together 458 different institutions and organisations. The total cost of these proposals was 179 Meuro, with a requested funding of 114Meuro. The result of the evaluation was the selection of 7 new RTD projects and a small support measure. The total budget allocated for this was a little over 11 Meuro. We are at present closing the negotiations on the selected projects, but we can already indicate the broad area of applications, namely:
Again even before we have concluded the contract negotiations for the projects selected in the 2nd Call we have already concluded the evaluation of the 3rd Call. This 3rd Call is in many ways different from the first two. Firstly it relates to the IST Work Programme for the year 2000, whereas the first calls were for the 1999 Work Programme. Secondly we tried to provide a stronger focus on digital libraries research and at the same time trying to keep intact our focus on Europe's cultural and scientific institutions. Thirdly we wanted to kick-start our co-operation agreement with the NSF in the US.
The stated objective of the action line was "to improve substantially access for citizens and professionals to Europe’s expanding repositories of cultural and scientific knowledge".
For cultural knowledge our focus was on systems integration for advanced digital library applications and test-beds for very large, diverse and highly distributed cultural information and concept spaces. The focus for scientific heritage was on the creation of international science collaboratoria.
We wanted that the work should address global consensus on common specifications and practices for new data models, architectures, benchmarks and metrics, test suites, meta-data directories and trust infrastructures.
We have only very recently completed the evaluation of the 3rd Call and our conclusions are still to be verified and properly documented. However it is already clear that we can point to another success. We received 51 proposals with a requested funding nearing 100 Meuro. I expect that we will fund six or more RTD projects and three new support measures. Overall validation of the selection is still needed from the Member States however there are clearly some interesting trends, namely:
At least two of the six RTD projects have formal relationships with US partners who will submit partner proposals for NSF funding.
In terms of the support measures we can expect to see new networks for the visual arts and Europe's national library infrastructures, as well as extensions to the Cultivate network to cover new countries.
In the Work Programme for the year 2000 two more action lines related to digital heritage and cultural content are still to be issued and evaluated.
Action Line III.1.5 Trials on new access modes to cultural and scientific content
The objective is to foster the adoption and introduction of leading edge technologies for the access to cultural and scientific content. The focus is on trials using state-of-the art technologies for memory organisations (archives, libraries, museums, etc) that add value to collections and associated services. Domains of interest include new navigation tools, wireless access to the Web, improved visualisation of artefacts and collections, community building for thematic collections, etc. In all cases the trials should be driven by an authentic need as expressed by a well-defined user profile.
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IMPORTANT If you are an active small or medium sized cultural institution, or if you work closely with such an institution, then Action Line III.1.5 is SPECIFICALLY designed for you. We have tried to create an easy to use opportunity not to do research but to experiment with new technology. The demands are simplified in many ways, namely:
Check it out and if you have questions contact us on digicult@cec.eu.int
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Just a few hint for those who are interested:
Action Line III.1.6 Virtual representations of cultural and scientific objects
The objective is to explore and experiment with novel ways of creating, manipulating, managing and presenting new classes of intelligent, dynamically adaptive and self-aware digital cultural objects, either held by memory institutions (archives, libraries, museums, etc) or directly involving digitally born objects or art forms.
The focus is user-centred and includes:
User interaction and models for interactivity with high-quality virtual representations of valuable cultural objects, and the creation and navigation of virtual cultural and scientific landscapes.
The work should focus on and result in the sustainable development of valuable digital repositories in Europe’s libraries, museums and archives. This includes models for future virtual collections and guidelines for integrating real and virtual objects and collections. It should provide examples of how dynamic user interaction with the cultural and scientific content can enhance the user experience. It addresses the experiences of learning, exploring and entertaining for the user.
This is much more a traditional RTD action line where there is a well-established body of experience emerging concerning the type of projects likely to be funded. Some hints on this action line are:
Commission services are always available to provide comment
and advice (with the usual disclaimers) on proposal ideas, etc.
Just send your idea either to the IST help desk or better still
to digicult@cec.eu.int
The preparations for the work programme 2001 are currently undertaken. Probably two Action Lines will be open for proposal submissions. One action line could concern advanced digital library applications where the focus will be visual aspects and integrating emerging new visualisation techniques into new Digital Library models. The second action line could focus on a more local or regional approach towards what is called the living record of society and the way people create and interact with their own digital culture.
A final issue could be the development of competence centres for heritage institutions. Topic domains could be visualisation, imaging, ontology development, content analysis, XML/RDF, preservation of the digitally-born, etc.
Over the last two years much progress has been made. A single unique domain for research into digital technologies for cultural and scientific content has been created. Nearly 200 proposals have been received and evaluated for a total requested funding of about 340 Meuro. A total of 26 RTD projects have been selected which bring together more than 250 of Europe's top academics, research organisations, technology companies and above all cultural institutions.
Networks have already been established on awareness building and information provision (Cultivate-EU, Cultivate-CEC), digital library research (DELOS) and training on licensing in Central and Eastern Europe (CELIP). New networks will be developed on a series of conferences on the interface between culture and technology and on the networking of Europe's national library infrastructure. Extensions to the Cultivate network are also expected so that coverage is completed in all countries participating in European research. New networks are expected to focus on local libraries, film and audio-visual archives, and digital preservation issues.
These efforts over the last two years have certainly mobilised in excess of 600 person-years effort. It can be expected that before the end of the programme more than 1000 person-years will have focused on a small number of critical RTD issues. Our next task is to ensure than the results are well disseminated and are in a from that will maximise impact in the cultural sector.
And as a final remark I hope that Cultivate Interactive becomes quickly both a reference publication in its field and an interactive tool of value to the cultural and scientific community. I wish it a safe and profitable trip into the future.
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Bernard Smith
Head of Unit for Cultural Heritage Applications
Directorate General Information Society
bernard.smith@cec.eu.int
Phone: +352 4301 34195
Fax: +352 4301 33530
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For citation purposes:
Smith, B. "Digital Heritage and Cultural Content in the New Information Society Technologies Programme",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/ist/>
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By Frank Boumphrey - July 2000
Frank Boumphrey reports on Gutenberg at the HTML Writers Guild (HWG). 'Project Gutenberg' is an initiative started by Michael Hart. Its mission was to convert the worlds great literature to ASCII etexts. To date this has produced over 4000 texts many of them of high quality. These texts are in English, although a large number of them are English translations of Classic European Books. Gutenberg at HWG is an initiative sponsered by the HTML Writers Guild to convert these, and other suitable etexts to XML. Because XML has full support for Unicode, this initative encourages the transcription of documents in their native language and Character sets.
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'Gutenberg at HWG' aims to make available to the general public the worlds great literature, in an easily accessible, easily readable electronic formats [1].
There are numerous sources of electronic literature available, probably the best known of which are the texts transcribed by "Project Gutenberg".
Project Gutenberg was founded in 1971 by Michael Hart. By pure serendipity Michael was given a windfall of several megabytes of storage space (worth millions of dollars in those far off days!), and he decided to use this windfall to store the worlds great literature. His criteria were (and remain):
For the most part, Gutenberg texts are rendered as 128 ASCII, with 65-70 characters to a line, and paragraphs are delineated as double line breaks. The Gutenberg texts also can use multiple source documents. To date over 4000 books and documents have been marked up in this format, and these are freely available by visiting the "Project Gutenberg" web site. It so happens that well over three quarters of the texts available are European classics, either English, or English translations.
Other notable efforts to make available texts in electronic form include texts marked up in SGML (mainly using the TEI DTD). Both Oxford University in the U.K. [2] and the University of Virginia in the USA have large repositories of literature available, both as SGML and as ASCII text.
There are many other scattered efforts, and there is indeed a great need for a source to co-ordinate and centralize all these efforts, so that they do be come truly available to every one.
It became obvious to us that if texts were marked up in a format that could be easily read on most desk-top computers then they would become more usable and thus functionally more available. The obvious choice of markup language to use was XML, which had several advantages over HTML. Our plan is to use our membership to markup existing documents.
The mission of 'Gutenberg at HWG' is to markup e-texts in XML or some other non-binary format in order that the content and structure of the worlds great literature, including literature written in non-ASCII character sets, is not only preserved, but is also functionally accessible for perusal, research and conversion to other media formats.
The HTML Writers Guild is a not for profit educational foundation with over 130,000 members, including several thousand in Europe. Although most of the available texts are English, or english translations, we would like to expand our activity to non-English languages. We already have a cadre of volunteers who are prepared to markup books and documents written in Italian, German, French, Spanish, and Polish.
Before looking at the pro's and con's of various e-text efforts, we would do well to answer the question, "Why bother?"
By and large two negative attitudes prevail.
The fact is, as anyone with teenagers understands, is that we are living in an electronic, 'instant gratification' age, and new-comers to literature just are not going to do either of the above. Even the texts set out in school curriculums for the most part do not get read, the 'scholars' usually employ some 'Hamlet in a Nutshell' kind of series to get their work done. The vast majority of students in developed countries are not going to go out of their way to find the classics of European literature. They are going to stumble across them, and then, if they are lucky, the magic may start eating into their soul!
If we are honest, most of us came to an appreciation of literature that way! I personally got fascinated by Poetry when I was forced to learn Walter de la Mere's "the Traveler" by heart as a punishment! I was lucky, and had access to a good library in order to pursue my new found love. Many are not so lucky. For them etexts are the answer.
It is only those already converted to the merits of classic literature who will find the time and the energy to go out of their way to access good literature.
There is indeed a need to make good literature available and easily accessible to everyone.
As mentioned previously, there already exists etexts in various formats, so we should ask the question: "What problems exist with the existing available literature, available in ASCII text, SGML, and other formats, and how does XML overcome these problems?
The ASCII text of the books of Project Gutenberg are readable, and are accessible to anyone with a text reader. However ASCII text as a format for reading books has numerous drawbacks.
The problems of reading on the screen are well known. By and large the reading rate is about half of that for the printed word, and the retention rate is about a third. This is due to several factors. Poor resolution makes serifed texts (the preferred font for reading) difficult to read; the postcard format of the screen makes for difficulty and orientation; and the scrolling feature means that the readers eyes are constantly having to relock on a point of reference. All these problems are compounded by the use of unstyled ASCII text. Styling using, say, XML and a style sheet can alleviate if not completely overcome many of these problems. Hopefully in the near future custom designed readers will further alleviate screen reading problems so that reading on a screen becomes almost as easy as reading from the printed page. Although it is possible to print out a styled document, this is wasteful of environmental resources, but work is proceeding on developing a re-usable paper for these purposes.
ASCII text, especially as used in the Gutenberg project only supports the English character set. Although it is possible to use the other Latin Character sets with ASCII 256, The Cyrillic and Greek sets are not supported, not to mention languages such as Arabic, Kanji, Hebrew etc. This is certainly a big draw back of a text based system.
Although human readable, there is not easy way that a computer can analyse and parse the content of the document. This is a big draw back if the document is to be used for research.
Even minimal markup of semantic or structural content of a document increases its value and usability.
Although text documents can be used by text readers, the lack of markup makes for a plain translation. Marking up a document in XML means that intelligent user agents are able to better render a document for the client.
A further disadvantage of ASCII is that it cannot capture any diagrams or art work that may accompany the
SGML has several disadvantages for the markup of popular texts, both for the potential reader, and for those who would markup the texts.
For the reader of a text, SGML parsers are not readily available, and they are expensive. An SGML parser/reader can cost nearly 2000 Euros! For the volunteer who is going to markup the text, SGML has a steep learning curve, and it is not likely that a part time marker would invest the necessary time and effort to learn it.
XML on the other hand is a powerful subset of SGML, with most of SGML's functionality, and only a fraction of its difficulty. Further more there are an abundance of XML tools available and most of these are free!
Marking up a text in XML immediately provides numerous advantages which can be summarized as follows.
Both the structure of the document, and the nature of it's content are easily described by using XML markup. This is of tremendous benefit both to serious researchers and the casual reader.
XML can be combined with a style sheet, and an attractive and readable display will result. IE 5, Netscape 6, and Opera 4 all have support for XML.
It is easy to convert an XML document from one document type to another. It is possible to write a simple XSL style sheet to convert one XML document type to another, including XHTML, which means that the documents and texts can be read in down level browsers as well as the most recent ones.
XML uses wide 2 bit characters which means that it can be used to every character set in the world. This means that European documents can be displayed with their correct characterization and nuances.
XML markup is a boon to sight-impaired users. It allows them to easily book mark and 'browse' through a document.
We are just starting out on with Project Gutenberg, and have just got beyond the 'Proof of Concept' stage. We already have an impressive cadre of volunteers, have produced several tutorials, and have marked up about 250 texts in XML or XHTML [1]
Our immediate goals include the following:
Our initial concept was to use TEI-XML for markup, but this proved to be too complex for most of our volunteers. We have therefore developed some interim DTD's, and plan to develop a series of DTD's specifically for this project. We have also developed a series of tutorials for a simplified TEI subset that we are encouraging our markers to use.
Murray Altheim of Sun Microsystems is spear heading this effort. This really needs to be done in collaboration with other existing Library groups.
We do not consider ourselves to be in competition with any one. We are particularly interested in collaborating with any organization with a similar mission statement to ours. In particular we are interested in collaboration with any national group that is interested in transcribing and marking up their heritage literature.
Volunteers are the life blood of our organization. We are looking for volunteer markers as well as those expert in the library sciences for our advisory group. We are also looking for persons with administrative skills (perhaps a retired person?) that can commit to a half days work a week.
We are particularly interested in those who have the skills to
mark up non-English documents. If anyone is interested in
volunteering please e-mail Frank Boumphrey at Frank@hwg.org
and put "Project
Gutenberg Volunteer" in the subject line.
We have almost finished setting up a dedicated server for Gutenberg at HWG. We are also interested in mirroring on other sites, and will also mirror on our site similar endeavors. Of course we wish to maintain a series of links on our Web pages to other sites specializing in e-commerce.
Too often an organization tends to center around the personality of its founding members, and when they leave the organization tends to wither. Making European and other classics available in electronic forms is for the benefit of future generations as well as our own, so we are particularly interested in producing a viable forward looking board, and strong collaboration with other groups to make sure that what has been started will continue
Gutenberg at HWG is an exciting project that is just getting under way. We would certainly like to co-operate with the European Cultural heritage program in every way that we can, and we are particularly keen to hear from volunteers who would like to participate in this project.
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Frank Boumphrey
frank@hwg.org
<http://www.hwg.org/>
Frank Boumphrey is the Vice president of HTML Writers Guild.
He is Director of Gutenberg at HWG.
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For citation purposes:
Boumphrey, F. "European Literature and Project Gutenberg",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/getenberg/>
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By Bruce Royan - July 2000
Bruce Royan describes one possible model for Cultivate. The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network was set up by museums, libraries and archives to create multimedia, manage digital IPR and provide educational access. SCRAN enforces standards for preservation and interoperability, and its licensing-based business model indicates it can be sustainable into the future.
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The success of the European Cultural Heritage Network will depend in part on the development of organizations able to bring together resources from a range of memory institutions and a variety of curatorial traditions in order to create holistic educational content, and then deliver such content seamlessly and consistently to the citizen at a public access terminal. One such organization is called SCRAN [1]
SCRAN, the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network, is a Millennium project, with an initial spend of £15 million Sterling to build a networked multimedia resource base for the study and celebration of human history and material culture in Scotland. Although based on the libraries, archives, museums and built heritage of Scotland, SCRAN's prime concern is not with conservation, nor with documentation, but with educational access.
SCRAN was set up as an independent, not-for-profit, limited company to manage the digital intellectual property rights of its members [2]. In effect, SCRAN offers grant aid for the digitization of cultural treasures, in exchange for a non-exclusive licence for their educational use. Contributing institutions gain a new digital asset, which they can exploit commercially if they wish, while librarians, teachers and students at institutions in membership of SCRAN can download images, movies and sound clips, copyright cleared and ready to use.
All resources are digitised at a very high resolution (not less than 3072 x 2048)(Fig 1)
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| Figure 1: Extract from an Archive-quality SCRAN Image |
From this archival resource, a network surrogate is created at a lower resolution (currently 768 pixels on its longest axis), to minimise download time. This networked resource may only be downloaded by members of a bona fide educational institution (public library, school, college etc) licensed by SCRAN. It is protected by an invisible "watermark" (to confirm the resource’s Copyright status) and "fingerprint" (to identify who downloaded it and when). To avoid any accusations of "entrapment", this information is also clearly shown in banners at the top and bottom of the downloaded image (Fig 2).
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| Figure 2: Downloaded Educational-quality SCRAN Image |
But any member of the public, anywhere in the world, has access to a thumbnail image of the asset, (150 pixels on its longest axis) plus full textual documentation. This documentation contains descriptive and access information, extracted from conventional library catalogues and museum collection management systems, and normalized to be compliant with the Dublin Core set of metadata elements [3]. It is supplemented by explanatory caption material specifically written to a set of educational guidelines, worded to be understandable by the intelligent lay reader, and to build into a vast online encyclopedia (Fig 3).
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| Figure 3: SCRAN record Available freely on the Web |
The SCRAN resources available online in this way are being developed as a collection of discrete assets; each of them should be self-explanatory, and any of them may be linked together for a particular educational purpose, and used time and again. Some of these articulations have resulted in CD-ROM publications, which are distributed at cost to licensee institutions as well as being sold commercially [4]. Others are available on the website as value-added services for licenced users: an example of this is the range of Pathfinders, brief illustrated guides to key people, places, events and things that may be found on the resource base (Fig 4)
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| Figure 4: Extract from a SCRAN Pathfinder |
The SCRAN resource base [5] already gives access to 400,000 records from memory institutions nationwide: from Shetland to Galloway and from Fair Isle to Dunbar. Over 72,000 of these records include multimedia: images, sound and film clips and virtual reality, contributing to a rich picture of the cultural heritage of Scotland. By August 2001 at the end of its initial grant period, these totals will have risen to 1 Million and 120,000 respectively. There would be little point, however in creating such a vast digital resource base, if it were to cease to be available online once the grant had been spent, and so SCRAN has from its beginning been working to a Business Plan which provides SCRAN with a sustainable future [6]
This plan relies on SCRAN being able to obtain substantial revenue streams from licence sales to educational institutions. SCRAN strongly supports the principle that educational resources should be made available free at the point of use, but just as libraries are accustomed to purchase books so that their students can read them for free, we believe that educational institutions will pay a reasonable price for their students to access SCRAN. So far, the signs are that such a sustainability model will be achievable. Some 2,000 educational institutions including schools, colleges, universities, museums and public libraries have bought SCRAN licences and the UK Joint Information Systems Committee has recently announced its intention to purchase SCRAN access for every Higher and Further Education Institution in the United Kingdom. It is beginning to look as if, in Scotland at least, there is a future for The Past.
(6 June 2000)
(6 June 2000)
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Professor Bruce Royan
Chief Executive
SCRAN
Abden House
1 Marchhall Crescent
EDINBURGH
EH16 5HW
Scotland
United Kingdom
bruce@scran.ac.uk
<http://www.scran.ac.uk>
Phone: +44 131 662 1211
Fax: +44 131 662 1511
Bruce Royan has over 30 years experience in the field of electronic cultural and information services, working with British Telecom, the London Borough of Camden, The British Library and the National Library of Scotland, before implementing the Singapore Integrated Library Automation Service (SILAS) in the mid-80s. He returned to the UK as Principal Information Systems Consultant with Infologistix Ltd, consulting and lecturing worldwide. After 7 years as University Librarian and Director of Information Services at the University of Stirling, he is now the Chief Executive of SCRAN.
Bruce serves on the Library and Information Advisory Committee of the British Council, and the Digitisation Advisory Panel of the UK New Opportunities Fund. He is also Visiting Professor of Publishing and Communication at Napier University.
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For citation purposes:
Royan, B "Scotland in Europe: SCRAN as a Maquette for the European Cultural Heritage Network",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/scran/>
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By Mario Bucolo - July 2000
Museumland.com is a world wide portal to online museums and cultural heritage organisations. It is one of the largest database in the world with more then 5921 links from 113 nations [1].
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Museumland.com is a point of reference for users all over the world to search any web site, news or information area related to cultural heritage, museums and galleries. Museumland.com was created to fill the gap between museums and Internet users. Using Museumland.com it is possible to access thousand of on-line Museums and Cultural Heritage institutions. The site is updated daily with new links from an increasing number of nations in the world.
On Museumland.com users can find any type of online museum from history museums to art museums, from automobile museums to war museums and so on. Some of the current categories of online Museums include archaeological, artistic, ethnological, scientific, technological, religious, historical, musical, natural, children museums, war, photographic and virtual museums. Museumland.com also reviews any related institution/organisation such as libraries, monuments, gardens, churches, abbeys, castles, zoos, parks, planetariums, collections of regalia, famous people's houses etc.
Museumland.com aims to enable access to a better quantity and quality of information. There are thousands of museums in the world and on Museumland.com you will all be able to access all of them that are on-line.
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| Figure 1: The bronze statues of Riace |
The two famous bronze statues of Riace, licensed by the Italian Cultural Heritage Ministry, are now the official testimonials of Museumland.com.
The Museumland idea was initiated in September 1999. It is now managed by Mario Bucolo and co-promoted within the context of the European Commission DGXIII initiative MEDICI framework [2], though no financial support is given. The technical department is co-ordinated in Italy by ABIS Multimedia and the marketing and editorial staff are based in London at Multimedialand Ltd [3].
The key point of Museumland.com is the opportunity to have a unique reference point for museum and cultural heritage organisations. If anyone tries to search for the word museum in "Altavista" they will find more than 3 million related web sites. A search on "Yahoo" will give different results but a similar number of hits. Such a search would not consider all the possible translations of the word Museum either; for example museum is museo in Italian. The advantage of using Museumland.com as a unique gateway to the museums, galleries and cultural heritage contents, information and news is self evident.
An area of Museumland.com's work is in helping traditional museums with the process of moving online. It operates as an Incubator for any museums or cultural heritage institution enabling them to join the web. Museumland.com will host micro web sites for the museums or cultural heritage institution that are currently not online in order to allow them visibility on the Internet. This opportunity is free of charge.
Museumland.com gives benefits for both users and Museums:
Museumland.com is now on the way to setting up an international partnership. They have settled agreements for mirror sites in Japan, France, UK, Portugal, Eire, and Argentina. Museumland.com will also be soon available in 7 languages. The ambition of Museumland.com is to be the top world-wide reference portal for the museum and cultural heritage sector.
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Mario Bucolo
ABIS Multimedia
bucolo@multimedialand.com
Phone: +39-095-387092
Mario Bucolo has 17 years experience in the computer graphics field and 14 years experience working on multimedia applications. He is the manager and owner of ABIS Multicom, based in Catania, Italy and Multimedialand Ltd, based in London. He teaches Ethnomedia and is the author of many articles and presentations given in international congress. Mario is the project leader of a number of multimedia applications for many different information points in the museums, cultural heritage, tourism and retail sectors. His specialised area is human-computer interface design.
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For citation purposes:
Bucolo, M. "Museumland.com - The World Wide Portal to Museums and Cultural Heritage",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/museumland/>
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By Tara Morris - July 2000
A new Web service for projects covering educational and training technologies under the European Commission's Information Society (IST) programme has recently been launched. Called PROACTe - Promoting Awareness and Communication Technologies in Education – the service gives users immediate access to information about educational technologies and research across Europe.
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PROACTe’s key objective is to become a central portal for raising awareness of education and training technologies in Europe and disseminating the results and products of the Education and Training Action Line under the IST programme.
PROACTe supports, valorises and facilitates the dissemination and take-up activities of the projects of the Education and Training Action Line, as well as implementing actions in support of consensus building between the projects. PROACTe also undertakes activities (targeting both the projects and a wide range of external players, end-users, providers, the press, and policy-makers) aimed at actively promoting the dissemination of information from the European Commission through clearly identified dissemination channels to the interested public.
The Internet is an essential tool for demonstrating and publishing the results of the Education and Training Action Line. The website is a central focus for the education and training community, providing up-to-date quality information on educational technologies from European Initiatives and beyond. PROACTe uses the Web as a cost-effective tool for involving as wide an audience as possible in its activities and promoting the education content of the Action Line.
As well as being a central focus for the projects, the information is provided in such a way as to maximise its audience and increase the Education and Training Action Line's market penetration. Links are being formed with other key initiatives to provide a well organised, comprehensive source of information on education and training and other related activities.
Specifically, PROACTe is establishing a World Wide Web presence for the Education and Training Action Line to:
In line with the philosophy of the Fifth Framework Programme, regarding user led policy development, the Education and Training Action Line website provides a forum for users to become involved in ground level initiatives. These will contribute to building new policies for the future priorities of education and training technologies.
PROACTe has contacted all the projects of the Education and Training Action Line and formed links to their websites. The website is networked to other sources of information at the EU level, content industries (INFO 2000, Internet Action Plan, Global Information Networks), audio-visual policy, cultural initiatives, education and training, and language (MLIS). PROACTe is also linked to national initiatives in the Member and Associated States as well as related services across the globe. The whole site is structured for ease of access and comprehensibility to allow browsers find the information they need quickly and easily.
As well as organising information categorised by the Action Line for those involved in projects, the site will also cluster information in other ways to enhance accessibility (for example by schools, universities, on-the-job-training and research). It is important to demystify the structure imposed by funding under the Fifth Framework Programme. The user needs to be able to find what they want, immediately, using their own terminology and without needing to understand the structure of the Fifth Framework Programme. There is a sophisticated fully functional search tool which will pick up on the classifications given to the data on site.
A key focus of the website is to provide information in a way which aims to promote and enhance the profile of the Education and Training Action Line.
PROACTe facilitates community building. This community building has the basic aims of:
The methods of approach varies depending upon the needs of the users: Some groups prefer closed restricted access between interested members whereas others have chosen public for a. PROACTe has made provisions for both. PROACTe will play an active part in identifying key topics for discussion in conjunction with the Commission and other players in educational technologies.
In order to attract people back to the discussions, PROACTe will monitor the information flow and send out digests to members of the community. This will have the benefit of maintaining the high profile of the Action Line and distributing the outcomes of important dialogues in the educational technologies community.
PROACTe co-ordinates its activities with other Support Projects and European Standards on publishing on the Web. Its overall aim is to ensure that it demonstrates good practice in relation to electronic publishing. PROACTe will publish the electronic versions of project deliverables received from the Commission as well as all other publications produced by this Action Line. All projects being supported by the Action Line are also able to publish their documents in this space. Documents are available in a variety of formats (RTF, PDF, Word, HTML).
PROACTe provides a "news" service to inform its audience of latest developments. Users can subscribe to receive the full news by e-mail, to receive headlines by e-mail once a week.
The news articles are updated weekly and reflect current trends in the field of educational technologies. Articles cover the latest policies/ initiatives, new book or journal releases, calls for papers, calls for proposals, relevant websites, etc.
Forthcoming events are also listed chronologically, linking to full conference details. Past events are also listed in an archive for reference.
The whole site is classified using metadata. This drives the advanced search features. At its simplest users can search the news, events, projects or the whole site using free text searches. They may further refine their search to sections or title, keyword or description to retrieve more specific information.
For the education and training research community, PROACTe aims to be a one-stop shop for all its information needs. Whether it is forging links, finding out about the latest news or cutting edge research, look first to PROACTe.
For further information please contact:
PROACTe
13b Avenue de Tervuren
B-1040 Brussels
info@proacte.com
<http://www.proacte.com>
Phone: +32-2-7438949
Fax: +32-2-7327111
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Tara Morris
Content Manager
PROACTe
tara_morris@ecotec.com
<http://www.proacte.com>
Phone: +32-2-7438949
Tara Morris is content manager for the PROACTe portal site.
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For citation purposes:
Morris, T "Educating Web Research", Cultivate Interactive, issue
1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/proacte/>
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By Alexa Joyce - July 2000
Alexa Joyce reports on the European Treasury Browser [1],the European Schoolnet's [2] web-based educational resource infrastructure for schools in Europe, linking together existing national, local or specialised repositories, encouraging new online publication, and providing a reliable level of quality and structure.
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Why do we need yet another browser system to add to the many we already have? At European Schoolnet, we are constantly on the look out for high quality teaching and learning resources. But online learning materials for schools - pupils and teachers - are difficult to find and publish. Considering the limited time that teachers have to prepare lesson plans, it's obvious that they need quick and easy-to-use resources. Also, schools and colleges all over Europe already have many digital and non-digital materials of their own - by sharing them internationally cash-strapped institutions could save time and money, while maintaining a high standard of teaching.
The aim of the European Treasury Browser project is to build a Web-based educational resource for the whole of Europe. By using a metadata networking infrastructure to link together existing national repositories, we also hope to stimulate new publication, and provide a reliable level of quality and structure. Via its thesaurus and multilingual metadata solutions, the project allows searching of resources Europe-wide in a choice of languages.
Furthermore, the project aims to add value to these systems by adding a user-friendly layer to help teachers and students locate resources using the Schoolnet Information Space with rules to facilitate location of relevant resources. The users want access to all data repositories, whatever indexing method is used.
The user should only obtain the most relevant resources for their own needs. This rich information space can become a vast source of educational material classified according to subject and resource type for use by teachers in preparing lessons, and by students for reference and research, or guidelines and best practice for education managers.
The ETB formats, stores, categorises, labels and filters information. This is essential in today's climate of information "flooding" - currently search engines and other tools produce so many results that we simply do not have time to look at them all. The project also addresses the problem of filtering - by producing an edited database, educators can be sure that content will be free of illegal or harmful content such as pornography or hacker/cracker sites.
The keyword of this project is QUALITY. Certainly, a general problem of the Internet for schools is the easy access to qualitative and relevant material. At a national level, this is basically dealt with by establishing databases firmly linked to the national curriculum. The National Grid [3] in the UK and the Educsource in France seem to be two examples in this respect. However, most of them are still not based on the selection of quality criteria. Measuring the quality of resources refers to the actual benefits of the introduction of these resources in the educational process. To become a resource for schools, information coming from different contexts, from different education systems, which has been produced for different projects, with particular characteristics, must be organised, structured in such a way which can be easily recognised by every one. It must be structured on the basis of a data model and standards, which constitute "conventions" or European standards, which can be easily understood beyond national and local contexts
There is an obvious need for metadata harmonisation between different initiatives and communities, both within the school sector and other communities. For the European Treasury Browser, this is tackled in a new way. The approach acknowledges the different levels of metadata harmonisation, like: encoding, transfer protocol, semantics, query language/protocol, retrieval of search results, controlled vocabularies.
ETB uses an extension of the Dublin Core [4] semantics and its RDF/XML name space for basic elements, HTTP for metadata transfer and RDF for metadata encoding as well as for data modelling for metadata not supported by the Dublin Core (DC) and Dublin Core Qualifier Name spaces (DCQ), in the next generation of products we maximize our chances for inter-operability. An API to interface to existing metadata repositories and intelligent authoring tools will be developed.
ETB closely integrates a developed subject thesaurus into the metadata infrastructure. The thesaurus is Web enabled and described through an RDF data model and/or the Zthes profile of Z39.50. The thesaurus distribution format will be based on XML. ETB software tools will re-configure based on thesaurus updates. All this allows the creation of both intelligent metadata authoring tools, and accurate muliti-lingual, search systems.
Even to make possible or to facilitate monolingual searching, a monolingual thesaurus is a great advantage: If there are more than several thousand resources (or documents or document like objects) a controlled vocabulary is needed for targeted searching. This is much more important if the resources are coming from different languages. To describe and find the same topics, which are given in different languages, a translation of the indexing vocabulary is needed. In the educational area there exists an additional problem because of the different educational systems in the countries or even in the regions: the right elements describing for instance the different school levels have to be matched across the languages or cultures. A multilingual ontology has been developed by ETB for the specific school area as a top level indexing framework. Supporting of the retrieval can be done at the input level and/or at the search level. On both levels a thesaurus can be helpful. When the indexing is done by the author/publisher of a single resource it supports the search process very effectively. The multilingual thesaurus will also be integrated into the system's configuration and support Search interfaces and the search algorithms.
Some users may have some foreign language knowledge, but their proficiency may not be good enough to formulate queries to appropriately express their information needs. Such users will benefit enormously if they can enter their queries in their native language, because they are able to examine relevant documents even if they are untranslated. Monolingual users, on the other hand, can use translation aids to help them understand their search results. In general, users need to achieve more accuracy and reliability in cross-lingual information indexing and retrieval. The users of the school platforms should have the real chance to find information or resources which are originally written in an other language in order to get in contact with pupils and teachers in other countries or regions studying the same or very closely related topic. They also must have the chance to understand at least roughly what is described in the other resources and whether these resources are valuable for their interest. Therefore cross-lingual information retrieval and translation facilities or tools are imperative.
Despite using some highly technical methods for creating the European Treasury Browser, for users the ETB is relatively simple. Resources are wide ranging, offering useful descriptions and links in each subject area. Our current favourites are:
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Alexa Joyce
European Schoolnet
Rue de Trèves 61
Brussels
1040
Belgium
alexa.joyce@eun.org
<http://www.eun.org>
Phone: 00 322 790 7560
Alexa Joyce is employed at European Schoolnet
, a web community and
portal for teachers, pupils and other education professionals.
She is responsible for the European Knowledge Centre newsletter,
coming up with new features, researching the link repository and
playing annoying techno in the office.
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For citation purposes:
Joyce, A. "Browse Through Europe's Educational Treasures",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/etb/>
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By Robin Bourne - July 2000
The Axis database is the only national information resource on British artists and makers. Containing visual and textual data on over 3,300 contemporary British practitioners, it is a rapidly growing source of up-to date information for researchers, commissioning agents, curators, architects, patrons and purchasers of visual artwork. Axis also plays an important national role in promoting contemporary art and artists and widening access to visual culture.
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Finding easily accessible information about a contemporary artist or craft-maker can be difficult. Individuals often work in isolation without financial or professional backing. With this in mind, Axis, the national contemporary visual arts information service based in Leeds, has for the last 7 years been compiling a national central register of contemporary visual artists and makers, which is available free of charge to anyone interested in their work. The information is stored and displayed on the largest interactive multimedia database of contemporary British art on the Internet, the Axis database.
Late last year, Axis took contemporary British art into a new dimension by putting its database of over 3,300 artists and 12,500 images on-line. Almost one year on, the response has been quite staggering. Over 15,500 users visit the site each month, but who are they? And what do they look for?
Recent research by Axis confirms the on-line art world is alive and kicking. From students to academics, from architects to interior designers and advertising agencies, all are taking advantage of the free on-line service.
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| Artist: Marie
Goodenough [1] Title: Red Pepper | Artist: HAG [2] title: Storm in a teacup | artist: Jeremy Broun [3] title: Caterpillar Rocking Chair |
Kate Hainsworth, Chief Executive of Axis, comments: " Many of our users are art dealers, galleries and designers as you would expect. But over 65% have been private collectors. This is great news for artists and proves that the Internet can bring art to a wider and more diverse audience. Many reasons are given for visiting the site, but by far the most common is to buy artwork, the reason given by over 60% of respondents. We’re extremely pleased and so are our artists. The Axis website gives our artists national and international exposure and is easy to get to."
Traditionally, artists seeking exhibition, commission or sales opportunities would take their portfolio to galleries and send their slides to art buyers and then wait for a response. Nowadays, artists, through necessity, are becoming increasingly proactive and aware of marketing and promotional opportunities. The idea of an Internet presence that can create work and promotional opportunities at a completely different level by servicing a national and international audience has been quickly embraced by an increasing number of artists. However, there are some difficulties involved, particularly in attracting “traffic” to an individual’s site and the time and cost of maintaining and keeping the site up-to date. By registering with Axis, artists have found that they can overcome this problem and display their work alongside other established contemporaries on the Axis database.
Axis as a resource was developed from the 1988 National Visual Arts Project which aimed to support and assist the development of visual arts, crafts, photography, performance and live art in the UK by serving the needs of practitioners, visual arts professionals, patronage, research and education. A feasibility study undertaken in 1989 by Susan Jones on behalf of AN Publications, determined that these needs would be best served by the setting up of a comprehensive computerised visual arts information and research resource. From the outset the concept was ambitious, focusing on the development of a state of the art multimedia artists register. In 1990 a steering group was formed to set up the company, to secure start up funds and to identify a base for its operations. As the result of a competitive tendering process it was agreed that Leeds Metropolitan University (formerly Leeds Polytechnic) would host the organisation providing physically accessible city centre office accommodation. In 1993, ‘Axis – for information on visual artists’ was designated a resource of national strategic importance by the Arts Council of England (England’s national arts funding body), and Leeds Polytechnic was successful in its bid to become the home base for the project.
By 1995 Axis had launched the National Artists Register (now called the Axis database) as a multimedia database of artists, complete with CVs and examples of their work, and the Axis Information Service and network of Axispoints had been established.
Five years on, Axis is continuing to develop its resources and scope, funded by the Arts Councils of England, Wales and Scotland, and seven of the ten regional arts boards. These bodies fund Axis to provide information on their behalf about visual artists and craftspeople. Axis has also received four European development awards and continues to enjoy sponsorship from Leeds Metropolitan University and identity consultants, Luxon Carra.
The Axis database contains a summary of each artist’s curriculum vitae and up to nine images of their work. Since the information is in an electronic format, the user can find information quickly and easily, focusing searches on their areas of interest. The database is available online, as a stand-alone application (an Axispoint) at a growing number of national venues, and on CD-ROM. Axis has been criticized for adopting a range of access methodologies, rather than relying solely on the World Wide Web, but this criticism fails to acknowledge that the Web itself is still limited in terms of overall accessibility and because of problems connected with the speed of downloading images and interrogating large amounts of data. The Axispoint with 17 search options, speedy retrieval and high quality image resolution remains the best experience for the user. With more Axispoints due to be installed in Scotland and Wales this summer, a comprehensive national network is well on the way to being established giving Axis a regional as well as global presence. Development of the online version of the database will also continue as Axis strives to increase the accessibility of the database to new audiences.
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| Figure 1: Axis Search Screen |
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| Figure 2: Thumbnail images |
The Axis database system consists of eight different database files and a number of application tools for data entry, update and various print utilities. It has been implemented as a hybrid model of Microsoft Access 2.0 and Microsoft Virtual Basic 3.0 elements, and is designed for growth. To meet the increasing demand for accessible information inside and outside Axis, existing components have been modified and new components added to the system in the form of new Access databases and Visual Basic applications. Slides and prints of photographed work submitted by the artists are digitised and stored on CD ROM. Each digitised artwork is represented in three different sizes: thumbnail, medium and large. A zoom facility allows closer inspection of the largest images. Thumbnails are stored as bitmaps (.bmp format) whereas medium and large-sized artworks are stored as fractals (.fif format). The Axis online database was designed by Tim Deighton at Warp Interactive, specialists in online databases. This innovative company have established a firm reputation for stylish online galleries and powerful web development
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| Figure 3: Artwork |
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| Figure 4: Zoomed in on image |
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| Figure 5: Artist's CV |
Axis, since its inception, has proved to be an essential resource for those seeking detailed information on contemporary visual artists and craftspeople. Enquiries are regularly received from a wide range of users including commissioning agents, art consultants, exhibition organisers, curators, researchers, teachers, the media, architects, artists, local government arts officers and arts administrators. Between April 1999 and April 2000, Axis answered over 6,000 user enquiries.
On the Axis database you can find details of artists’ work history, training, inspiration, work methods and contact details. Printouts of these details and colour images of artworks are available at a nominal cost.
The database currently holds information on over 3,300 artists and makers ranging from well-known artists such as Rachel Whiteread , the 1993 Turner Prize award winner, Ana Maria Pacheco, David Mach, Paula Rego, Basil Beattie and Michael Craig Martin, to recently established and newly emerging artists. Originally information was only held on those artists who had been nominated onto the Axis database by their regional arts board. To overcome this restriction, self-funded registration was introduced which allows artists and makers to nominate themselves. Artists need to provide evidence of professional practice to be included in the Axis database. Self-funded registration provides the enquirer with a greater range of artists to choose from, working in a wide variety of media. As more and more artists join Axis, the Axis database continues to be the obvious place to begin a search for contemporary artists.
The Axis database contains the artwork of artists and craftspeople from across the whole spectrum of contemporary practice. That includes sculptors, conceptual artists, printmakers, ceramicists, designers, photographers, painters, video artists, jewellery makers, metal workers and many more. The number of artists registered with Axis is increasing all the time. Artists can update their textual details at any time, and are encouraged to keep their information as current as possible.
The structure of the Axis database allows large amounts of information to be searched in a variety of ways. Complex searches can be built up using a wide range of different criteria. For example, Axis has received requests for information on the following:
Experienced Information Service staff at Axis can help enquirers find the artist they are looking for or can provide advice on how best to use the Axis database to find a range of artists and/or works.
Descriptive authority lists or lexicons of the artist and his or her practice, can be utilised by the enquirer in various combinations for searching the Axis database. Information can also be obtained through a series of criteria that are applied to the examples of artwork illustrated in the database. Each artwork is described by four defining sets of variables: artwork type, techniques, characteristics and approach, which together identify the nature of the work and its production process, both technically and with reference to current art practice. Thus each type of artwork is characterised by one of 45 terms such as ceramics, environmental art, mosaic, photograph and textile. For techniques, up to three are listed from a lexicon of 105 terms, such as aquatint, collography, slip glazed and welded. For characteristics of the artwork up to two are selected from 34 terms, such as commemorative, gallery-based, kinetic, three-dimensional and wall-mounted. And up to three terms are chosen from a list of 55 describing approach, such as abstract, conceptual, erotic, still life and symbolic. Finally the artist lists three materials used in the artwork’s production.
It is the ability to search by either or both entry pathways, the artist on the one hand, and the artwork examples on the other, which give the Axis database its power. Since the descriptor terms are selected by the artists themselves, their ‘ownership’ of the information on the database is ensured. It is of course important to ensure that the lexicons are in tune with current contemporary art practice and are both precise and wide-ranging. As the numbers of images on the database increases, the need for usable and effective lexicons becomes more and more essential. With this in mind, they are reviewed every couple of years to keep pace with changing terminology and technology.
Whilst Axis is at present in a transition period from project development to service delivery, new projects are still very much part of the vision. A recent development has been the establishment of a new three-dimensional virtual gallery, CyberAxis, which is currently hosting four exhibitions and artists’ debates on the Axis website [4] to celebrate the year 2000 - Year of the Artist. Visitors to CyberAxis are able to navigate the virtual gallery using a virtual body – avatar - to approach artworks and to communicate with others, as you would when visiting a normal gallery.
New communication technologies can give access to visual arts in different ways. Axis have developed the CyberAxis gallery as a means of facilitating discussions to shape the mutual roles and responsibilities of the artist and society. Through the use of developing technology to present artworks, Axis hopes to attract a different audience to contemporary practice and debate, particularly younger people. It is hoped that the project will propose a new angle of debate, presentation and 'space' in the new Millennium.
In recognition of its work with new technologies, including virtual galleries, Axis has recently been invited by the Creative Industries Taskforce (DCMS) to contribute to their enquiry panel into Internet development for the creative industries.
Ten years on from its beginnings, Axis continues to develop its database and information service, to attract new artists and provide up-to date information to established and new audiences. So, if a visit to Tate Modern is not an easy option for you (or even if it is), why not pay a visit to the Axis website or an Axispoint, to view a dedicated digital showcase of the talent, innovation and quality of British professional and emerging visual artists and makers.
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Robin Bourne
Principal Information Officer
Axis – For Information on Visual Artists
r.bourne@lmu.ac.uk
<http://www.axisartists.org.uk/>
Phone: 0113 245 7946
A graduate in Art History and English, Robin has worked at Whitaker's Almanack, the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum and in the library at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. He was also Thesaurus and Reference Data Manager at the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England in Swindon where he compiled the national data standard - The Thesaurus of Monument Types. Before joining Axis he spent two and a half years at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham compiling the national Artists' Papers Register and designing an accompanying online database. He is shortly to take up the post of Information Officer with the South West Museums Council in Taunton, Somerset.
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For citation purposes:
Bourne, R "British contemporary art at your fingertips: the Axis Database", Cultivate Interactive, issue
1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/axis/>
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ISSN 1471-3225 |