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This page is intended for printing purposes. Note that the internal links to references will not work correctly.
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By Concha Fernández de la Puente - July 2000
This section aims to provide news of the European Commission's initiatives in the field of digital heritage and cultural content. Its objectives are to summarise the latest developments in programmes, projects and activities and to give a clear picture of progress in the area. It certainly does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of what the EC is doing in the area but rather a short summary of some of the key items. The content is based largely on the information provided in the e-Culture Newsletter, published by the European Commission, DG Information Society, Cultural Heritage Applications Unit [1].
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Any account of EC initiatives in the field of digital heritage and cultural content must include a reference to e-Europe [2]. This initiative is aimed at accelerating the uptake of digital technologies throughout Europe, including in the area of culture. E-Europe, launched in December 1999, was given additional impetus at the recent Lisbon Summit on employment, economic reform and social cohesion. It is expected to foster a number of changes in Europe over the next few years as we advance towards a complete and equal information society.
The other and in our case fundamental initiative is the Information Society Technologies Programme (IST) [3] and in particular its digital heritage and cultural content area [4]. Complete information on this area and its work can be found in the article Digital Heritage and Cultural Content in the New Information Society Technologies Programme, prepared by Bernard Smith and published in this first issue of Cultivate Interactive. It is in the framework of the IST programme that CULTIVATE, the European Cultural Heritage Network, has been funded, and through CULTIVATE this magazine.
The socio-economic aspects is one of the important issues of IST research. The Cultural Heritage Applications unit therefore decided to evaluate the socio-economic impact of the first round of proposals funded under the IST Programme in the area of digital heritage and cultural content. The report [5] prepared by the evaluators provides some new guidelines that might form the basis of criteria for judging the SE element of projects based on a range of conceptual and practical indicators of socio-economic significance that might determine future research in the field of European cultural heritage.
The Commission is now preparing the IST workprogramme 2001. In order to prepare the input from the digital heritage and cultural content area, two brainstorming meetings were organised:
The Digital libraries research for access to cultural and scientific resources meeting [6] tried to identify emerging research trends and issues for advanced/innovative access to cultural and scientific resources. The meeting brought together experts from digital libraries, virtual reality, information visualisation and other fields
The Creating a living on-line record of Europe's cultural diversity meeting [7] brought together experts from across Europe with experience in the provision of new services in and around the library, museum and archive institutions, particularly at local or regional level.
The output of both meetings will be considered when drafting the action lines for the digital heritage and cultural content area of the IST workprogramme 2001.
The Fifth Framework Programme includes another important initiative addressing cultural heritage fostered under the Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development Programme. This has a key action called City of Tomorrow and Cultural Heritage [8] which aims at protecting, conserving and enhancing the cultural heritage for the sustainable exploitation of its socio-economic potential for employment and tourism. To achieve this, the action will focus, among other things, on development and demonstration of technologies and products for diagnosis, protection, conservation, restoration and sustainable exploitation of the European cultural heritage, focusing on both movable and immovable cultural assets with a view to promoting their value and the quality of life.
While the current Fifth Framework Programme is well advanced, we are still monitoring on-going projects under the former Fourth Framework Programme in which libraries, museums and archives have also participated. Some 30 Libraries projects are still on-going. One of the last activities under the Telematics for Libraries [9] programme was the conference Consolidating the European Library Space [10] that took place in Luxembourg in November 1999. This meeting, that prepared the transition from the 4th to the 5th Framework Programme, aimed to review the achievements of the past programme, to evaluate the results and to look at emerging issues facing the European information society in the new millennium.
In parallel the Impact study of the Telematics for Libraries Programme under FP4 [11] was being prepared. A total of 49 projects (including accompanying measures) were financially supported under this programme, receiving 29 Million Euro in total. The report provides an integrated presentation of results and related findings which allows us to assess the impact that the programme has had on the European library scene.
Important work in this field is also continuing in the INFO2000 Programme [12] that terminates at the end of this year. This programme is aimed at stimulating the emerging multimedia content industry to recognise and exploit new business opportunities. Some of the projects funded under this programme came into the areas of culture [13] and multimedia rights clearance [14].
As a follow up to INFO2000, we find the other important initiative in the digital content area: the “European Digital Content on the Global Networks” (eContent) programme [15], which builds on the activities previously carried out under INFO2000 and MLIS. eContent aims to explore the potential and to test the market response in three specific areas where market barriers prevent the full development of Europe content. One of the areas is exploitation of public sector information.
Also applicable to the area of cultural heritage is the TEN-Telecom Programme [16] that promotes innovative applications and services in areas of common interest with a high social or business impact contributing to the development of the information society. The programme launched a Call for Proposals for projects of common interest in the field of trans-European telecommunication networks - Generic Services and Applications. One of the areas featured in the Call was: Access to Europe's cultural heritage.
The other key EC initiative in the area of culture, although not in the research sector, is the CULTURE2000 programme [17]. This is a European Union financial support programme aimed at European cultural co-operation. Its principal objectives are the promotion of cultural dialogue, creativity and the trans-national distribution of culture, the promotion of cultural diversity and common cultural heritage, and improving public access to culture. Calls for Proposals are launched at the beginning of each year. The programme started in 2000 and will run until 2004 inclusive. The first call [18] was launched on 8 April 2000 and its at the moment being evaluated. The key issue for this year is music.
Last but not least, we should mention the successful project To create an Information System for the Russian State Library [19] funded by the EC in the framework of the TACIS programme [20]. The project aims at supporting the modernisation of the Russian State Library from a traditional library to a digital library, introducing new information technology which meets the growing information needs of the Russian market and brings to life the vast resources of this national library. To present the results from the project, the international conference Managing the digital future of libraries [21] took place in Moscow from 19-20 April 2000. This type of initiative demonstrates the importance of the international co-operation in the framework of the EC work.
In this overview we have reviewed a number of important EC initiatives addressing cultural heritage in a digital environment. The development of e-Europe and the progress and results of the work carried out by the digital heritage area of IST will probably have a significant impact on future strategy and activities. We will of course keep you informed of developments as they occur.
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Concha Fernández de la Puente
European Commission
DG Information Society
Cultural Heritage Applications
concha.fpuente@cec.eu.int
<http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ka3/digicult/>
The information provided does not necessarily reflect the official position of the European Commission.
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For citation purposes:
Fernández de la Puente, C. "DIGICULT Column",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/digicult/>
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By Rosalind Johnson - July 2000
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What is a Cultivate national node? One dictionary described a ‘node’ as a ‘knot or knob’. This is not a bad definition – it is easy to feel quite knotted when grappling with the intricacies of the European Commission form-filling needed for the project. But the nodes can also been seen as knobs on the doorways to information, or knots holding together the strands of a net – the network of nodes that is a vital part of the Cultivate-EU measure.
The concept of Cultivate national nodes arose from the National Focal Points (NFPs) that existed in all EU Member States under the European Commission’s former Telematics for Libraries programme. The NFPs were based in a variety of organisations, including national libraries and government departments. In the UK, the British Library originally took on the tasks associated with the UK NFP, and this role transferred to the Library and Information Commission (LIC) in 1995 [1].
Many of the Cultivate national nodes continue the work done by national organisations as NFPs, often with identical personnel. This has ensured a high degree of continuity, and a strong ‘net’ that can support less well-established nodes.
The original Cultivate proposal was divided at an early stage into two proposals, Cultivate-EU for the EU Member States, and Cultivate-CEE for central and eastern Europe. At present, nodes are only established in Member States, as Cultivate-CEE has yet to launch. Twelve Member States are represented.
National nodes are established in many different organisations across Europe, and are no longer exclusively library-oriented, but include museums and archives in their remit. Although their specific task under Cultivate is to advise on the digital heritage opportunities of the IST Programme, in practice the variety of organisations and persons involved means the national node network includes expertise in many different areas, and in other European programmes. National node personnel and other project partners include specialists in digital libraries, metadata and cultural projects.
Under LIC, the UK NFP established a mailing list, lis-uknfp (now lis-european-programmes) to disseminate information on the Libraries Programme [2]. The list’s remit widened to encompass all forms of funding and research opportunities from Europe of interest to the UK libraries sector, and has now extended to the museums and archives sector. This experience was useful when the Cultivate proposals were being discussed among the NFPs, as the need for an open, public list for the Cultivate measures was seen as essential to the project. The UK node is now acting as list manager for the cultivate-list, with technical functions provided by another project partner, UKOLN at the University of Bath.
The cultivate-list was launched in the UK just before Easter 2000, and all national nodes were encouraged to publicise it within their own countries. One of the intriguing aspects of being list owner was tracking just who had posted the information where. Firstly, a large number of Norwegians joined the list, closely followed by Spanish and Finnish members. The number of new members from these countries fell after a few days, but list membership continued to rise as other countries followed. More recently, a significant number of Swedish members have joined the list and, interestingly, what appear to be UK local government members – possibly local authority archives and museums personnel. The list now has around 400 members, and the next step is encouraging more people to post news of information days, successful IST projects, and requests for partners [3].
The work of LIC, and of the Museums and Galleries Commission, was taken over on 1 April 2000 by a newly-created body, Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries[4]. Fortunately, this did not seriously affect work on Cultivate-EU or Cultivate-CEE.
The creation of Resource could be a positive change for the work of the UK node, in that it brings together an existing, and expanding, UK network of libraries, archives and museums specialists. This reflects the fact that Cultivate national nodes are no longer focussed only on libraries, but are extending their remit into all cultural heritage networks.
There are many opportunities for national nodes under Cultivate. The UK node has been primarily involved with the creation of the e-list. Other future possibilities include arranging national events, not only for those interested in applying for funding under the IST Programme, but also events disseminating the results of successful projects. The nodes may also provide limited consultancy; depending on the resources of the node.
Cultivate-EU has just begun; Cultivate-CEE should shortly be launched. As the project develops, other national nodes will report in this column on further developments and initiatives for the benefit of the European cultural heritage sector.
with
this text in the body of the message: subscribe cultivate-list
(your email address).
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Rosalind Johnson
UK National Node
Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries
19-29 Woburn Place
London
WC1H 0LU
rjohnson@willshere.freeserve.co.uk
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For citation purposes:
Johnson, R. "National Node Column: United Kingdom",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/nodes/>
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By Carmel Smith - July 2000
The objective of the meeting was to bring together the IST consituencies to exchange experience and ideas and draw-out guidance for the DG on the theme ‘Personalising content’. The conclusions of the meeting are presented in this article and will be published on the EC website. The outcomes of the meeting provide an input to planning future activities of the DG and ultimately strengthen the IST programme integration in 2001.
Five brief presentations were delivered describing different perspectives on personalisation: the technology, the market, the mobile and social, the legal and the user perspectives. The purpose of these presentations was to present ideas and themes to stimulate discussion. Three discussion groups, assuming different perspectives on personalisation, addressed six questions designed to draw-out issues and guidance on personalisation for the sector.
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Personalisation is at the heart of a user-friendly IST. The trend towards increased bandwidth, media convergence, multiple access, mobility and personal mobile devices presents both an opportunity and a challenge for the application of personalisation in the Interactive Electronic Publishing (IEP) sector. Changing business models in IEP are far more complex than current personalisation solutions can readily cater for.
New projects addressing personalisation should pay attention to personalisation of service rather than just personalisation of content. Personalisation should be seen as a process, combining a dialogue between all parties (b2b, b2c, c2c) with exchange of data to provide services with added value. At present the dialogue is very limited, characterised by service push. There are movements towards permission-based, consumer-orientated personalisation. Making personalisation transparent to the user would be a key factor to improve dialogue. Providing the user with tools to manage their own personalisation may be another. More objectivity is required to choose solutions, which cater for the many different stakeholder interests in personalised IEP services.
To effectively employ personalisation in new complex IEP scenarios, requires more understanding of the business and technology issues. Already multimedia content is delivered via multiple channels and media to heterogeneous users who use different personal devices in diverse social and environmental settings. Clearly current technological mechanisms are not tuned to business approaches and rules. Better customisation solutions require more attention to emerging or new business models and practices in IEP.
Personalisation software is still in its infancy, which means there are no turn-key solutions. Further, Europe significantly lags behind USA in getting new tools to the market. Solutions using agent technologies still have a lot of hurdles to overcome. Current solutions are too complex and not cost-effective for SMEs. To improve this scenario, additional technology approaches need to be evaluated and areas of improvement identified.
User profiles, the system model of the user, are based upon technological or at best marketing/advertising models. These user models are insufficient. Those at the sharp end of personalisation, the technology developers, are calling for a better understanding of the usability and user acceptance requirements for personalisation. Technology developers need more guidance on what kinds of information users are prepared to give the service provider, how they can acquire the data and what personalised content and service delivery response is desired by different users.
More sophisticated models of the social and psychological aspects of on-line consumer behaviour are needed. Research should be directed towards improving understanding of e.g. personas, facets of human memory, consumer motivation, on-line purchasing, content consumption, media usage habits, tolerance of automated personalisation versus user-controlled personalisation, etc.
Many current day examples of personalisation are cosmetic, unhelpful and in some cases time consuming and annoying to the user. Automating the user interface is a complex undertaking. User consultation and usability trials throughout development are essential to provide ‘user-friendly’ services. Personalisation is not a substitute for good user interface design (Jakob Neilsen). Personalisation implies higher standards of user interface design and usability than ever before.
The five presentations on personalisation are outlined in section 3. The group discussion and recommendations for the sector, i.e. activities required, research themes to address and ways of expanding the constituency and improving proposal submissions, etc) are presented in section 4.
Wolfgang HUBER (Head of Unit) and Pascal Jacques (Head of Sector) provided the brief and context of the meeting. The objective of the meeting was to bring together the IST constituencies and to seek their guidance, experience and ideas on the theme ‘Personalising creative content’. The outcomes of the meeting provide an input to planning future activities of the DG and ultimately strengthen the IST programme integration in 2001.
In the IST Workprogramme 2000, Key Action III had two action lines directly addressing personalisation. These were open for proposals in the 2nd Call.
III.1.2. ‘Personalising Content’ - To develop, validate and demonstrate personalised publishing and personalised delivery and authoring solutions for distributed multimedia content
III.1.3. ‘Trials and test-beds for digital content authoring and personalising systems’ - To promote the use of new multimedia authoring and design systems as well as personalised applications of high-quality multimedia content and services in key areas (knowledge, business and lifestyle publishing, advertising and geographic information).
Nine projects were selected:
The objectives in IST 20001 are highly focussed on personalisation:
This consultation meeting considered the current state of the art of personalisation in IEP and issues, actions and priorities for 20001.
In the morning, five brief presentations were delivered describing different perspectives on personalisation: the technology, the market, the mobile and social, the legal and the user perspectives. The purpose of these presentations was to present ideas and themes to stimulate discussion. In the afternoon, three discussion groups, assuming different perspectives on personalisation, addressed six questions designed to draw-out issues and guidance on personalisation for the sector.
The presentations and discussion results are described the next two sections of the report.
There were five presentations in the morning of the consultation meeting each covering a particular perspective on personalisation: the technology, the market, the mobile and social, the legal and the user perspective.
Mr Boumans described personalisation as three phases: with an emphasis on direct-marketing in phase 1(the analog world); an emphasis on customisation for marketing purposes in phase 2 e.g. by affinity group, market segment, customer community; and an emphasis on true personalisation in phase 3 e.g. characterised by the service knowing the user personally.
A model of the Digital Content Loop model was introduced to show the cycle of transaction-information-communication in which personalisation fits. Different business applications of personalisation were presented: personalised web pages, personalised newsletters, catalogs and other email based communications, advertising, sales ordering and customer communities. Mr Boumans described how these applications were being used in www.worldscienceservices.com, a website offering B2B publishing services for professionals and scientists.
Mr Thomas Ritz presented some general comments on the technology perspective and the PEACH project. From a purely technology point of view, personalisation involves filtering content based on qualified information of the user’s textual interests and then presenting it in an appropriate media, at the desired time, to the desired environment. Personalisation technology comprises:
There are a number of technologies available but no turn-key solutions.
Personalised delivery presents key challenges:
Filtering
Formatting
Presentation
Agent based information retrieval presents key challenges:
Standards present key challenges
Prof. Peter Thomas was unable to attend the meeting but generously provided an outline of his presentation ideas. Prof Tom Bosser kindly stepped in to deliver the presentation ideas supplemented with his own comments.
By 2010, the internet will be ubiquitous. It will have reached into the lives of everyone who chooses to be connected to it, and many who will have no choice in the matter. The PC will be a specialist tool deployed for certain types of work. Most people will access the Internet through digital television, mobile phone, games console, DVD player, or through an internet appliance attached to a cable or ADSL network.
The world of the consumer can be seen in terms of 'i-zones', between which consumers move. These zones are:
(1) the television, or entertainment zone
(2) the office zone
(3) the mobile zone, and
(4) the communications zone.
The mobile zone divides into two parts, (a) the private space of the car and (b) the public spaces of the street, the train, or ‘third-places’ such as bars and cafés. At the same time, the distinctions between the segments of consumers’ lives will blur further. The separation of work, home, and social space will become less marked.
Wrapped around the digital market, technology, and wider societal perspectives on personalisation is that of the user perspective. The key user issues are:
Currently, the means of collecting such information in the digital world is through the requirement to complete an on-line registration form of which some parts are mandatory if one wishes to access a service. The 'personalisation' that results is weak - often only in the form of providing information that could have been gleaned through a competent web-search by a consumer.
This situation will change radically, as consumers realise that personal information is a commercial commodity. Information intermediary businesses (iis) are already arising which trade in personal information, offering the possibility of narrowcasting to specific micro-audiences. iis will in the future pay users for increasingly detailed access to their information and create a strong linkage between user demand and commercial products.
We can expect to see a range of i-products and i-services that are increasingly targeted at audiences of one, with clearly defined product and service differentiation according to the various i-zones.
To ensure the development of effective solutions that deliver permission-based consumer-oriented personalisation, the following RTD objectives are required:
Understanding the digital consumer: models of the digital consumer do not exist. What we have are models of consumer behaviour derived from existing consumer and retail marketing frameworks. A model of the digital consumer would include the ways in which i-zones and I-services interact to provide opportunities for consumers, and an understanding of the cultural demographics of the on-line world.
Understanding the nature of information relationships: the Internet economy is changing the nature of b2b and b2c relationships and generating a new c2c digital marketplace. Research is required to create a dynamic map of the shifting value chains between SME i-businesses, established clicks-and-mortar internet retailers/service providers, and consumers
Understanding UI requirements for personalisation: previous attempts to create 'personalised' systems (e.g. using intelligent/expert systems) have been largely unsuccessful. It is clear that if personalisation of digital content is to be effective new ui frameworks, methodologies and tools are required to create compelling user experiences.
Prof. Ole Laurisden provided a presentation on the mobile and social aspects of personalisation. The presentation began with a review of the changes from analog to digital in European broadcasting and telecommunications technologies, which concluded with a future model of ‘integrated communication’ in IP fields. Early basic standards, such as H323 underlie the integration of services via TCP/P over the Internet. Use of high speed ATM-LANs is pushing public Telecom networks to improve the wide area network. Services are potentially very cheap through telecommunications. The web can now carry 3.5 times the number of terabytes of media it could carry in 19998. The focus of the future is the merge of media with telecommunications. MPEG-coding is very important for digital convergence of Telecommunications, Broadcasting and Information Technology. The Internet is the point of technology convergence and is characterised by the coming together of a wide range of formerly distinct industries, in IT (Telecoms, Computer, Software, On-Line Information) and traditional media (cable, consumer electronics, entertainment media and custom publishing). The Lucent Network vision illustrates how all services can be organised around distributed servers compared to the centralised systems characterising the analog world.
Prof Laurisden predicts that in the future of unified TCP/IP network, users will access information services through their own personalised ‘content portal’, typically through a browser. A demonstration of a prototype personal hand held device showed how a person can use one device to help with all her information needs when visiting a new town, taking a trip to a gallery and using public transport. The mobile device provides everything the user needs, just when they need it, e.g. maps, prices, timetables, automatic ticket payments, taxi bookings, etc.
The presentation continued with a review of mobility and home access in 1999, mainly the launch of the WAP Homepage and the TV as an access point. Prof Laurisden described a model of Interactive Service Evolution moving through:
Most telecommunications providers have not yet decided how they will respond to digital convergence. Many have to make radical shifts in the their business attack strategies if they are to reap the benefits of the changing technologies and markets.
Questions relating to equality of access and privacy issues were raised at the end of this presentation on personalised services in the future mobile society. These were taken up further in the afternoon discussion.
Mr Jacques Folon (Bird and Bird, UK) gave a brief presentation on the legal aspects of personalisation concerning data privacy and consumer protection.
The EU Directive on data privacy appears to be having little effect. Only 1% of the companies in France adhere to the principles of the directive. The directive includes principles, which govern:
Personal data is any information on a person, which could be used to identify them directly or indirectly. Invisible data collection from browsers and cookies often use the IP address as key data. This is personal data according to the directive. But it is very insecure. ISP’s can easily reconcile IP address to a certain individual’s data. Strictly, according to the EU directive, all websites making use of customer profiling should declare their use of this data explicitly to the consumer and adhere to standards of data privacy and consumer protection.
Cross border data transfers are subject to laws which are not equivalent. In Germany the law goes further than the EU Directive and it can be complicated to do e-commerce and e-business. Mr Folon warns that if some countries go further than the directive and others take no notice of it, then Europe will not have the harmonisation it strives for.
Trust is the keyword. Personalisation data and personalised services have to be negotiated with the consumer. A trusting relationship has to be established, with an agreed exchange between parties.
In the afternoon three discussion groups addressed six consultation questions on personalising content.
Group 1: Market/Business perspectives
Group 2: Technology perspective
Group 3: Social, mobility, user, and legal perspectives
(Q1) A broader definition of personalisation
(Q2) The context of and trends in application in IEP sector
(Q3) Type of activities for sector to address
(Q4) Specific research themes to address
(Q5) The actors/stakeholders and ways to bring in new constituencies
(Q6) Ways to ensure proposals address needs of sector
Flip charts, pens and aide-memoires were available to each group. Discussion groups each assigned a rapporteur to present the discussion outcomes for each question. The chairperson summarised the general themes and overall conclusions at the end of the meeting.
Businesses in the IEP sector need to retain the customer in a competitive marketplace. Personalisation can increase business, interest and ‘stickiness’ and is used to engender customer loyalty and establish customer communities.
Personalisation should be seen as a process of building a profile, and making an appropriate personalised service response (e.g. content specific to user interests). Personalisation technologies should:
Personalisation techniques are currently applied in a service ‘push’ mode. These approaches imply a threat to consumer rights and privacy, suggest the use of ‘dirty’ sales tactics and are characterised by a distinct lack of transparency in the personalisation process.
Personalisation could help the consumer to find what he needs and to cope with the overload of information/content available. However current web sites provide very poor personalisation. A well-targeted search would, in many cases, provide better results. Furthermore traditional caching mechanisms don’t work with personalised pages making it impossible for the user to return to previously personalised content.
· Better mechanisms are needed to understand what the user wants. Using a profile to match content on only a few words is still a very basic approach and unlikely to deliver the type of personalisation scenarios anticipated in the future IST. Approaches to improved filtering should address the problem at the user end.
Users experience difficulty in expressing new and changing information requirements and finding their way back to content which was interesting and useful in the past.
· More tools should be provided for the user to formulate and manage their information needs
IEP models are moving away from one to one towards many to many service provision. Different types of service are technically feasible. Industry needs:
From all perspectives the sector should ensure that projects:
The discussion groups considered the open problems in personalisation which require longer term research. They identified requirements:
The personalisation process and the roles of the different actors within the publishing chain are unclear. In emerging models of IEP sector there are multiple actors: different multimedia content providers, content users, technology providers, market owners, aggregators, advertisers, marketers, etc. Some actors have multiple roles e.g. they can be both creators and consumers.
There are different actors in b2b, b2c and c2c IEP services. In a b2c and c2c personalisation scenario, consumers are actors at all levels: faced with providing a variety of personalisation data that leads to personalised services. The consumer can be a member of the public, and a semi-professional, creating and accessing content from multiple information points, personal car, TV, mobile phone, etc and also use public access points.
It is strongly recommended that project proposals include:
Personalisation is at the heart of a user-friendly IST. The trend towards increased bandwidth, media convergence, multiple access, mobility and personal mobile devices presents both an opportunity and a challenge for the application of personalisation in the IEP sector. Changing business models in IEP are far more complex than current personalisation solutions can readily cater for.
New projects addressing personalisation should pay attention to personalisation of service rather than just personalisation of content. Personalisation should be seen as a process, combining a dialogue between all parties (b2b, b2c, c2c) with exchange of data to provide services with added value. At present the dialogue is very limited, characterised by service push. There are movements towards permission-based, consumer-orientated personalisation. Making personalisation transparent to the user would be a key factor to improve dialogue. Providing the user with tools to manage their own personalisation may be another. More objectivity is required to choose solutions, which cater for the many different stakeholder interests in personalised IEP services.
To effectively employ personalisation in new complex IEP scenarios, requires more understanding of the business and technology issues. Already multimedia content is delivered via multiple channels and media to heterogeneous users who use different personal devices in diverse social and environmental settings. Clearly current technological mechanisms are not tuned to business approaches and rules. Better customisation solutions require more attention to emerging or new business models and practices in IEP.
Personalisation software is still in its infancy, which means there are no turn-key solutions. Further, Europe significantly lags behind USA in getting new tools to the market. Solutions using agent technologies still have a lot of hurdles to overcome. Current solutions are too complex and not cost-effective for SMEs. To improve this scenario, additional technology approaches need to be evaluated and areas of improvement identified.
User profiles, the system model of the user, are based upon technological or at best marketing/advertising models. These user models are insufficient. Those at the sharp end of personalisation, the technology developers, are calling for a better understanding of the usability and user acceptance requirements for personalisation. Technology developers need more guidance on what kinds of information users are prepared to give the service provider, how they can acquire the data and what personalised content and service delivery response is desired by different users.
More sophisticated models of the social and psychological aspects of on-line consumer behaviour are needed. Research should be directed towards improving understanding of e.g. personas, facets of human memory, consumer motivation, on-line purchasing, content consumption, media usage habits, tolerance of automated personalisation versus user-controlled personalisation, etc.
Many current day examples of personalisation are cosmetic, unhelpful and in some cases time consuming and annoying to the user. Automating the user interface is a complex undertaking. User consultation and usability trials throughout development are essential to provide ‘user-friendly’ services. Personalisation is not a substitute for good user interface design (Jakob Neilsen). Personalisation implies higher standards of user interface design and usability than ever before.
UEA have kindly hosted a discussion forum [1], entitled "The speed of technological development is rapid in the furniture industry. Are the new ideas and achievements utilized efficiently enough?". The participants of the personalisation consultation meeting have already begun to use it to continue the exchange.
Chairperson
Ms. Carmel Smith (Usermatics Ltd, Edinburgh, UK)
European Commission
Mr. Wolfgand Huber (Head of Unit D1)
Mr Pascal Jacques (Head of Sector)
Mr Michel Brochard (Administrator, Unit D1)
Ms Suzanna Giorgiou (Secretary, Unit D1)
Speakers
Mr. Jak Boumans (Electronic Media Publishing,
Netherlands)
Prof. Thomas Ritz (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Prof. Ole Laurisden (Danish Technical University)
Mr. Jacques Folon (Bird & Bird, London)
Prof. Peter Thomas (University West England)
Prof.Tom Bosser (Axit GmbH, Germany)
Participants
Luis Oliveira (INEC/IST Lisbon University, Portugal)
Riccardo Pascotto (T-Nova Deutche Telecom, Germany)
Pieter Kesteloot (WTCM ICT Belgium)
Marc Van Rymenant (NetWay sa, Luxembourg)
Joaquim Jorge (DEI/IST Lisbon)
Gema Lopez (SEMA Group, Spain)
Peter Baumgartner (University Koblenzlandau, Germany)
Concha Fernandez (INFSO D2 Luxembourg)
Michel Vander Straeten (Info2clear NV-SA)
Adrian Brazier (Dept. Trade & Industry UK)
Luk Vervenne (Synergetics)
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Carmel Smith
Usermatics Ltd
Edinburgh
UK
carmel@usermatics.co.uk
<http://www.usermatics.co.uk>
Carmel is a leading expert in usability and evaluation. She has a rare combination of skills in Psychology and Software Engineering, gained through employment in the IT Industry and in Military and University research laboratories. She has worked for over 15 years on all aspects of the design, development and evaluation of the User Interface. For the last 4 years Carmel has been an independent consultant working through her own company, Usermatics ltd, which specialises in user interface design and usability evaluation in E-Commerce, Electronic Publishing, Multimedia and Education and Training. She now provides strategic research for new User Interface concepts and works with multidisciplinary teams, designing, testing and evaluating the usability of new Internet-based services.
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For citation purposes:
Smith, C. "At the Event: Consultation Meeting on 'Personalising Content' - IST WORKPROGRAMME 2001 - Luxembourg 19th May 2000", Cultivate Interactive, issue
1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/content/>
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By Kim Veltman - July 2000
This article was intially written for MEDICI; a print version will be published from them.
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When the Internet began in 1969 it was largely a communication channel for high-energy physics. When the World Wide Web emerged in the 1980’s it rapidly became a repository for all subjects. In the past decades there have been three important trends:
Visionaries now speak of a time in the --near-- future when all recorded knowledge will be accessible through the World Wide Web. How to integrate these three kinds of knowledge will thus become an increasing challenge. Fortunately, many of the obstacles standing in the way of such a vision are already being tackled by organisations such as the W3C, the Internet Society, standards bodies and a number of international consortia. At first, problems of technological interoperability at the level of hardware and software dominated the scene. More recently, there has been increasing interest in interoperability of content. Here, work is being done on heterogeneous, distributed databases. The efforts of the Dublin Core (DC) to define a common ground through basic data entry fields are extremely valuable. The European Commission is supporting multilingual approaches through its Multi Lingual Information Society (MLIS) programme. The W3C is working on a Resource Description Framework (RDF), which will integrate other initiatives.
Metadata has emerged as one of the key concepts. This article focuses on three sets of problems concerning metadata which require further work. First, there are problems of quantity of copies and versions introduced by the enormous proliferation of images, words, sounds and other materials made available through Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Second, there are problems of determining the quality and veracity of these images, words and sounds. Third, there is a challenge of developing dynamic metadata to deal with cultural and historical dimensions of knowledge.
In the past, photographers typically made an image of selected paintings in museums and galleries, which were then used by a relatively small number of scholars who published books and articles. Today, with JPEG technology, a single painting produces a vignette, an imagette, a regular image, high definition image and a very high definition image. A single painting thus generates five images.
Developments in infrared reflectography allow us to see different layers [2]. If there were only three such layers under the surface, a single painting would thus generate 20 images (plate 1 in Appendix 1). In the case of a famous painting there is more than the original to be considered. There are copies. If there were four copies then those 20 images mentioned above would become 100 images. There are frequently also versions, variants, images based on and caricatures. Even assuming there were only one each of these for the original and the four copies, then there would be another 80 images (for the five resolutions), each with surfaces and three layers, i.e. 320 images. Thus one original painting would generate 420 images. Each of these would also be subject to reconstructions. Assuming three of these reconstructions for each of the above, one would have 1260 images generated by a single painting (plate 2).
If we include moving images of the same the problems multiply. It is true that the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG 7) and the MPEG 21 group, as well as the Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) [3] group are addressing some of these aspects. But we have no means, at present to gain systematic access to the whole spectrum of images linked with a single painting. Similar problems and examples exist with respect to text, sounds and other media.
Given the immense advances in ease of digital reproduction, questions of quality also become paramount. Here methods such as digital watermarks can help determine whether a given image represents an unaltered version of the original [4]. To illustrate the deeper problems entailed with respect to veracity it is useful to begin with an example of a relatively simple contemporary event such as a plane crash. At the local scene all the details of this event will be recorded. We will read in the local paper of who was killed, who their families were, how this has affected their neighbours, their colleagues at work and so on. At the regional level the same event will be recorded as a plane crash and a smaller number of details concerning the most important crash victims will be provided (plate 3). At the national level, there will be a more matter of fact report of yet another plane crash. At the global level, the actual event is not likely to be described. Rather we shall probably witness a tiny fluctuation in the annual statistics of persons who have died. In historical terms, say the statistics concerning deaths in the course of a century (what the Annales School might call the longue durée), this fluctuation will become all but invisible.
This example points to a first fundamental problem concerning metadata. Those working at the local, regional, national and historical levels typically have very different foci of attention, which are frequently reflected in quite different ways of dealing with, recording and storing their facts. The same event, which requires many pages at the local level, may merely be recorded as a numerical figure at the historical level. Unless there is a careful correlation among these different levels, it will not be possible to move seamlessly through these different information sources concerning the same event.
Implicit in the above is also an unexpected insight into a much debated phenomenon. Benjamin Barber, in his Jihad vs. McWorld [5], has drawn attention to a seeming paradox that there is a trend towards globalizations with McDonalds (and Hiltons) everywhere. At the same time there is a reverse trend towards local and regional concerns, which he describes as if this were somehow a lapse in an otherwise desirable progress. Looking at the diagram below (plate 3), it becomes clear why these opposing trends are not a co-incidence. Clearly we need a global approach to discern patterns in population, energy and the crucial ingredients in order to understand the big picture and to render sustainable our all too fragile planet. But this level, however important, is also largely an abstraction. It reduces the complexity of the everyday into series of graphs and statistics allowing us to see patterns which would not otherwise be evident. Yet in the complexity of the regional, are all the facts, all the gory details, which are crucial for the everyday person. Thus trends towards CNN are invariably counterbalanced by trends towards local television, local radio, community programmes, and local chat groups on the Internet. This is not a lapse in progress. It is a necessary measure to ensure that the humane dimensions of communication remain. In retrospect, Marshall McLuhan's view of this as a trend towards a "global village" is much more accurate than Barber's metaphor because it acknowledges symbiotic co-existence rather than dualistic opposition.
These problems of metadata become clearer if we pursue the hypothetical case of a plane crash from a slightly different point of view (plate 4). At the event there are usually eye-witnesses. For the sake of our illustration let us posit that there are three. There will also be on-site reporters who may not have been eye-witnesses. Again we shall posit three. They send their material back to (three) off-site press bureaus. These gather information and send them on to (three) global press bureaus. In our hypothetical example, the "event" has thus gone through some combination of 12 different sources (3 eyewitnesses, 3 on-site reporters, 3 off-site press bureaus and 3 global press bureaus, ignoring for the moment that the latter institutions typically entail a number of individuals). When we look at the six o-clock news on the evening of the event, however, we are usually presented with one series of images about the event.
It may in fact be the case that all twelve of the intermediaries have been very careful to record their intervention in the process: i.e. the metadata will often be encoded in some way. What is important from our standpoint, however, is that we have no access to that level of the data. There is usually no way of knowing whether we are looking at eyewitness one as filtered through on-site reporter two etc. More importantly, even if we did know this, there would be no way of gaining access at will to the possibly conflicting report of eyewitness two, on-site reporter three and so on. There may be much rhetoric about personalisation of news, news on demand, and yet the reality is that we have no way of checking behind the scenes to get a better picture.
Such a level of detail may often seem superfluous. If the event is as straightforward as a plane crash all that is crucial is a simple list of the facts. But the bombing of the Chinese Embassy during the recent Kosovo war offers a more complex case. We were given some facts: the embassy was bombed but not told how many persons were killed. We were told that the Chinese objected as if they were being unreasonable and only many weeks later were we told that this had been a failed intervention of the CIA. Until we have useable metadata which allow us to check references, to compare stories and to arrive at a more balanced view, we are at the mercy of the persons or powers who are telling the story, often without even being very clear as to who is behind that power. Is that satellite news the personal opinion of the owner himself or might it represent the opinions and views of those in whose influence they dwell? If we are unable to check such details we must ultimately abandon our attempts at truth concerning what we see and what we are told.
The problems concerned with these contemporary events fade in comparison with historical events, which are the main focus of our cultural quest. It is generally accepted that in the year 33 A. D. (give or take a year or two depending on chronology and calendar adjustments) there occurred an event, which might be described as the most famous dinner party ever: the Last Supper. From a contemporary standpoint there were twelve eyewitnesses (the Apostles) of whom four were also the equivalents of on-site reporters (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John). In today's terms, their reports were syndicated and are better remembered as part of a collection now known as the New Testament. Popular versions with less text and more pictures were also produced in the form of the Biblia pauperum: equivalents of an expurgated Daily Mirror
The theme was then taken up by the Franciscans in their version of billboards -- without the advertising fees – known as fresco cycles. This idea developed in Assisi, was marketed in their Florentine branch known as Santa Croce where the idea caught on and soon became the rage, so much so that the Dominicans soon used it in San Marco and elsewhere. In the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Leonardo da Vinci gave a new twist to what had by now effectively become the company slogan. The idea soon became part of the Church’s international marketing strategy. Copies appeared on walls as paintings in Pavia, Lugano, Tongerlo and eventually London. As part of the franchise strategy multi-media was used. So there were soon reproductions in the form of engravings, lithographs, photographs, three-D models, and eventually even films and videos. In the old tradition that imitation is best form of flattery, even the competition used the motif, culminating in a version where Marilyn Monroe herself and twelve of her Hollywood colleagues made out of the Last Supper a night on the town.
As a result of these activities in the course of nearly two millennia, there are literally tens of thousands of versions, copies and variants of the most famous dinner in history, which brings us back to the problems of metadata. If I go to one of the standard search engines such as Hotbot and type in Last Supper, I am given over 50,000 entries concerning the event, which happen to be on-line, or to speak technically, a subset of somewhere between 10 and 30% of that amount which have been successfully found by the leading search engines.
There is no way of limiting my search to the text versions of the original reporters, to large scale wall sized versions in the scale of Leonardo’s original, which was eight by four meters. Nor can one distinguish between Franciscan and Dominican versions, authentic copies as opposed to lampoons, caricatures and sacrilegious spoofs. To a great expert requiring a system to find such details might seem xcessive because they might know most of these things at a glance. But what of the young teenager living in Hollywood who, as an atheist, has no religious background and sees the version with Marilyn Monroe for the first time? How are they to know that this a spoof rather than something downloaded from a fifties version of CNN online? A true search engine would help not only the young Hollywood teenager but also help every true searcher. Indeed it should provide truth even if the searcher is "false."
Underlying the difficulties considered above with respect to the Last Supper, is a deeper set of problems. We expect our search engines to provide a single, static answer. By contrast, the realities of cultural and historical knowledge entail multiple, dynamic answers with respect to space, time, individuals, objects, concepts etc. Accordingly we need dynamic metadata to deal with each of these. Some simple examples will illustrate this need.
Current printed maps in atlases are static. Historically the boundaries and names of countries, regions and cities are continually changing. Electronic maps should therefore be dynamic such that they can reflect changes over time: how, for instance, St. Petersburg becomes Leningrad and subsequently returns to St. Petersburg, or how a Roman Empire begins in Italy, expands enormously throughout the Mediterranean basin, and then contracts again. As a result if I were searching for something in fourteenth century Poland, the search engine would consult a different map than for the Renaissance or for today. The question: Where is Poland? will thus shift with time and adjust accordingly. Applied globally this will furnish us with more than simple instructions of how to get there. It will make visible persons' misconceptions of geography at various points of history. It will show political differences: how, for instance, India's maps of India and Pakistan, may well be different than Pakistan's maps of the same two countries. To achieve this global co-operation will be needed. A spatial metadata project should produce dynamically changing atlases and link this with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Global Positioning Systems (GPS). This is a pre-requisite for visualising changing political boundaries and new approaches to history [6].
Current search engines are typically linked to a single time scale. Western knowledge typically assumes a Gregorian (or Julian) calendar. There are also Jewish, Muslim, Chinese, Indian and other calendars. Those of the Hebrew faith had their fourth, not second, millennium problem some time ago. At present, it requires the intervention of an expert to translate a date from one of these chronological systems to its equivalent in our Gregorian time-scale [7]. Needed is historical, temporal metadata, which allows automatic mapping among these standard chronological systems. This will be a significant step towards studying history from multi-cultural points of view. Hence, if I am reading an Arabic or Jewish manuscript and come upon the date 380, the system will immediately provide an equivalent in the Christian Gregorian or Julian calendars.
There are further problems with respect to individuals. Today there are static lists of the complete works or of a catalogue raisonnée of the writings, paintings and instruments by a given individual. What is known about the writings, paintings or instruments of an individual changes over time. The list of manuscripts by Leonardo was different in 1500, than in 1600, 1800 or today. The paintings attributed to Rembrandt were different in the eighteenth century, the mid-twentienth century and after the Rembrandt Committee finished its research. Indeed, at any given period in history, there is debate among scholars concerning the exact contents of such lists. One needs standard lists, which can then be adjusted to show which items are dubious or contested. Hence, such lists need to be dynamic (plate 6). Not only do the lists of contents change over time, so too do interpretations concerning the contents with respect to: transcriptions (plate 7); the meaning of a given term (plate 8); and the role of that term in various classification schemes (plate 9).
This dynamic dimension needs to be included equally into the history of interpretations (plate 10). At the simplest level, we need metadata to link primary texts with the secondary literature concerning those texts. Entailed herein are both a) changing historical knowledge about an individual, and b) changing perceptions of an individual. Paradoxically, persons now famous such as Montaigne or Leonardo, were judged very differently throughout the centuries, almost forgotten in some generations, particularly praised and often for different reasons in other generations. Our present search methods of presenting individuals do not take adequate account of such aspects.
Then there is an even more elusive challenge of assessing the authority of sources concerning an individual (plate 11). In the case of a genius such as Leonardo, for instance, thousands of persons feel prompted to write something about the man. The number of persons in any generation, who have actually read his notebooks, has never been more than a handful. The Internet potentially offers us access to everyone who cites Leonardo, but has almost no mechanisms in place to distinguish between standard works, generally respected works and non-authoritative lists. A radical proposal of some to re-introduce censorship is, in our view, not a reasonable solution. The problem is made the more elusive because the recognised world authority in one decade may well be replaced in another decade.
Needed, therefore, are new kinds of dynamic, weighted bibliographies, which allow us to have subsets on the basis of field specific acceptance, new ways of expressing and recording in electronic form the well established traditions of peer review, (which is totally different from attempts to do simplistic electronic computations of quality), to arrive as it were at peer review with an historical dimension in electronic form and yet still have access to a wider range of less authoritative or more precisely, less established by the authorities, sources in a field. In tackling such alternatives between the authority of sources versus (mere) citations, we would be using technologies in new ways to return to central questions of quality.
Present day sources typically focus on objects as static entities. Moreover, the limitations of print frequently lead us to focus on one example as if it were the whole category. Accordingly we all know about the Coliseum in Rome but most of us are unaware of the dozens of coliseums spread throughout the Roman Empire. Using the dynamic maps and chronologies outlined above, new kinds of cultural maps can be developed, which allow us to trace the spatial-temporal spread of major cultural forms such as Greek theatres or temples, Roman coliseums, or Christian Romanesque churches. This will allow novel approaches to long standing problems of central inspiration and regional effects, the interplay between centre and periphery, in some cases between centre and colonies. Such questions pertaining to original and variants (versions, copies, imitations), are again central to the challenges of a European Union which aims to maintain diversity.
Related to this new approach to objects is the question of different interpretations of a same object or complex of objects. Most of us are familiar with the Roman Forum from our secondary school history lessons. Most of us are unaware that Italian, French, and German reconstructions of that same Roman Forum are very different. Present day search engines focus on providing us access to the original Roman Forum. Cultural and historical metadata will allow us to call up these different interpretations as well and thereby allow us to see the differences in approaches.
In the realms of architecture and construction, firms such as AutoDesk have created a consortium to deal with Industry Foundation Classes. This project treats all the basic elements of architecture as intelligent objects. As a result a basic object such as a door is defined in terms of its different contexts. Hence if I am building a skyscraper, the software will immediately "know" that the doors thereof will need to be of a very different strength than if I am building a cottage. In other words, the advent of "intelligent doors" means that the software provides me with a basic shape, which automatically adjusts itself to the context at hand.
From an everyday, operational standpoint this marks an enormous advance because it saves architects and designers the trouble of calculating the parameters of every single door, window and other architectural unit. Inherent therein, however, there is also a great danger. If applied mindlessly all doors and windows would be alike which would result in a world-wide homogenization – which Barber [8] has called the MacWorld effect. The richness of the architectural tradition lies precisely therein that the doors and windows of Michelangelo are different than those of le Corbusier or Richard Meier; that fifteenth century Florentine doors are quite distinct from those in Lucca, Pisa, Rome and other European cities. This immensely rich tradition is documented in publications and photographic archives. Again there is a challenge to link the generic software with examples of unique expressions. Hence if I were an architect in Florence, the software would not only provide me with basic facts about windows, but also specific facts about Florentine windows.
Theoretically it is possible to go much further. One could add knowledge of individual Florentine doors and those of all cities through local databases, which can be accessed by the software. As a result the software could provide me with both general properties of doors and detailed information about Florentine doors. In the case of an historic home or building of the fourteenth century this information could be so detailed as to provide me with the entire history of restorations, which the building has undergone. In the case of Florence, there is an incentive to maintain the historical core. In more modern cities the exercise of design becomes even more interesting if I can call up experiences in other cities in order to arrive at new architectural forms. In other words the generic examples of intelligent doors in regular software can be greatly enriched by the particular, unique examples showing historical and cultural variants which can serve as a source of inspiration for new creativity.
Music entails a particular kind of cultural object. Unlike a painting or a sculpture, where the object defines the content, music in the form of notes merely gives instructions for content in the form of a performance. Hence, in music, different versions play a more central role than in painting. Multiple interpretations are the content and while one can dismiss wrongly played versions as uninteresting, interpretations by master players are all of interest. Pablo Casals may play the Bach Cello Sonatas very differently than Rostopovich and yet both are important. Dynamic metadata for music should thus provide access to the notes, their generic rendering and their individual interpretation [9]. Here there are important projects such as Standard Music Description Language, and Music Tagging Type Description (Mutated), which will be connected with MPEG 7.
Presently we have many different classification systems and thesauri. Concrete
proposals for mapping among these systems exist (Williamson [10], McIlwaine [11]). The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), the Marburg Archive and projects such as Joconde and TermIT have done very useful preliminary work in this direction. Systems such as the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) and developments in terminology allow more systematic treatment of relations among subjects into classes such as subsumptive, determinative, ordinal etc. (Perrault) [12]. A dynamic system, which allows us to switch between classifications in different cultures and historical periods would provide new kinds of filters for perceiving and appreciating subtleties of historical and cultural diversity.
The enormous implications for learning range from the philosophical and epistemological domain, where we could trace the changing relations of concepts dynamically to the humanities with courses on culture and civilisation (a term which again has very different connotations in French, German and English). Instead of just citing different monuments, works of art and literature, we could explore the different connections among ideas in different cultural traditions. For example, Ranganathan’s classification from India is much weaker than Dewey with respect to the fine arts, yet much more subtle than Dewey with respect to metaphysics and religion.
An integration of the methods outlined above will lead to new kinds of knowledge maps which allow us to trace the evolution of a concept both spatially in different countries and temporally, in different historical periods. This will allow us to return with new depth to the problems already broached above on several occasions of standard/ model versus variants/versions, of centre versus periphery and the role of continuity in the spread of major forms and styles of expression.
An integration of the above methods will further allow a new approach to the history of narrative and thereby new approaches to literature, art and culture as a whole. A culture such as Europe is confined to a relatively small number of major narratives, deriving on the one hand from the Judaeo-Christian tradition (the Bible, Lives of the Saints), and on the other hand from the Greco-Roman tradition (Homer, Virgil, Ovid). We belong to the same culture if we know the same narratives, if we have the same stories in common. Paradoxically those who have the same stories, inevitably develop very different ways of telling those stories. The media differ. For instance, in Italy the lives of the saints most frequently become the great fresco cycles on the walls of churches. In France and the Netherlands, the lives of the saints are more frequently treated in illuminated manuscripts. In Germany, they frequently appear in complex altarpieces. Not only do the media vary but also the ways of telling stories. The Life of Christ in Spain is very different than in the Balkans or within the Orthodox tradition in Russia. Even so the commonality of themes means that a European can feel an affinity towards a Russian Orthodox church, which they cannot readily feel with an Indian temple with stories from the Mahabharata or the Ramayana (unless of course they know these stories as well).
In these transformations of the familiar lie at once the fascination of change through continuity which inspired the studies of Aby Warburg and his school, and also implicitly, a series of important lessons about the keys to diversity. The most diverse narratives are precisely about the most familiar stories. To visualise and make visible the complexities of our historical diversities of expression is our best hope for understanding the challenges of future diversity. Inherent in such an approach lie the seeds for understanding changing definitions of Europe and for developing a vision of the Europes of tomorrow: dynamic phenomena, processes rather than static definitions. At the same time this a multicultural approach which goes beyond the traditional limits of Euro-centrism. Such narratives apply to all the great cultures, of China, India, Japan, Persia. Hence, such an approach to metadata will lead scholars throughout the world to change their research and others to research the implications of such changes.
Knowledge includes culture. Cultural heritage in museums, libraries and archives, concert halls and theatres plays an essential role in identity and has fundamental implications for employment, education, tourism and for content industries such as film, television, records and now Internet. In addition to technological standards, systematic multi-media access to this heritage requires interoperability of content and adequate usage patterns. This in turn requires metadata, which reflects the cultural and historical dimensions of knowledge and for which the Resource Description Framework of the World Wide Web (W3C) Consortium offers a useful framework.
The vision of MEMECS [13] recognizes the importance of interoperability of systems [14], but focusses on interoperability of content through the development of dynamic metadata for cultural and historical dimensions of knowledge. This approach, which is fully multilingual [15], includes dynamic treatments of time (with multiple chronological systems e.g. Julian, Hebraic, Islamic, Hindu, Chinese); dynamic treatments of space (with multiple maps reflecting historical differences, different projection methods and competing cultural claims). It includes dynamic authority lists for names, concepts, multiple classification systems, terms, texts, corpora of an individual, music, narratives, means of recording quality of the corpus and of the interpreters. With respect to objects and events it includes resolutions and layers of images in different media with links between copies, versions etc.; resolutions in detail from local to global; different versions of present and past events.
Much preliminary work has already been done through initiatives such as the Resource Description Framework, the Dublin Core [16], the Interoperability Forum, JPEG 2000, MPEG7 and MPEG 21, SMPTE and many metadata projects such as SCHEMAS. Already in 1995, the G7 initiated a project for Multimedia Access to World Cultural Heritage. In 1996, the European Commission initiated a Memorandum of Understanding for Multimedia Access to Europe's Cultural Heritage, which was a forerunner of the MEDICI Framework which is organizing this year's cultural track at WWW9. The full dimension of interoperability of content requires new technology, inter-disciplinary research and public and private partnerships, in which organisations such as the European Commission can play an important role in the formation and stability of adequate constituencies. Five aspects require development: technology, networks, pilot projects, research and international dimensions.
First, new technologies are needed to deal with dynamic maps, chronologies, names, objects and concepts. These might be co-ordinated by the RDF section of W3C, possibly in conjunction with the JRC and national supercomputing facilities such as INRIA, GMD, and CINECA (CNR).
Second, networks are needed which integrate the holdings of libraries, museums and archives and makes them accessible to research institutes and educational institutions with high-speed networks such as Internet 2, CANARIE and emerging European equivalents such as FING (France), and Gigaport (Netherlands). In large part, the infrastructure already exists. Needed are active connections between the content of memory institutions and research and education facilities, which can use the content in new ways as was recently confirmed in the eEurope action lines at a recent meeting in Lisbon [17].
Third, pilot projects need to combine the new technology via networks with content from memory institutions, namely, libraries, archives and museums (such as the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz and the Kunsthistorisches Museum) in interoperability labs for both research and education. Such projects would link content with concepts such as virtual reference rooms [18] through the use of multi-agent systems [19] and use these to develop new learning environments.
Fourth, interoperability of content through Internet access also requires research on other themes such as problems of method, access, reference, restoration, reconstruction, and terminology. Further analysis is required on appropriation and usage patterns of cultural data, based on inter-disciplinary approaches in anthropology, sociology, aesthetics, etc. This could be led by the emerging European Network of Centres of Excellence in Digital Culture in the context of the MEDICI framework.
Fifth, the development of metadata, reflecting cultural and historical dimensions of knowledge responds to world-wide concerns concerning the Internet's sensitivity to cultural diversity and preservation of the memories of civilisations. It offers an entry into implicit, tacit knowledge as well as explicit knowledge. Ultimately cultural and historical metadata should reflect the 6,500 languages of the world. These international dimensions should be reflected in Internet governance in the context of ICANN.
In the early days of literacy in the West, a series of rules for the use of language evolved. This gradually led to the fields of grammar (which dealt with the structure), dialectic (which dealt with the logic) and rhetoric (which dealt with the effects of language). Together grammar, dialectic and rhetoric became the trivium, the humanities side of the seven liberal arts (along with the proto-scientific quadrivium of mathematics, arithmetic, astronomy and music, figure 1).
|
Grammar |
Structure,Syntax |
Standard Generalized Markup Language |
|
Dialectic |
Logic, Truth of statement |
Resource Description Framework |
|
Semantics=Meaning |
Virtual HyperGlossary |
|
|
Rhetoric |
Effect, Expression, Style |
Cascading Style Sheets |
Figure 1. Links between the ancient trivium and recent Internet developments
When the Internet began in 1969 it was intended primarily to provide new ways for humans to communicate at a distance. The past decades have seen the emergence of a new challenge: to provide new ways for machines to communicate with each other without the intervention of humans. This helps to explain why the theme of metadata has become central to the world of computers. In the process, groups such as the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Society are effectively engaged in re-formulating in electronic form, the rules of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. The syntax aspects of grammar are covered by Standardized Graphical Markup Language (SGML) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Recent developments with respect to a Virtual Hyperglossary (VHG) [20]are addressing semantic elements. Expression and style relating to rhetoric are being covered by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and eXtensible Style Language (XSL, cf. figure 1).
This article began by drawing attention to a proliferation of copies and versions and to problems of quality and veracity. Such problems call for new approaches to dynamic metadata, which might be co-ordinated in a framework called MEMECS. It recommends that MEMECS could become part of W3's vision; linked with the European Commission's MEDICI Framework and furthered by the long-term research programmes of the Commission.
The Internet is not just about scanning in existing content or gaining access to digital materials. It requires pre-structuring our knowledge anew. It also entails finding electronic equivalents for all our rules and definitions of knowledge [21].Ultimately it requires changing our conceptions of knowledge itself. The challenge that faces us is to ensure that these transformations reflect all the diversity of our being rather than reducing us to the limitations of some algorithm. That is why the cultural and historical dimensions of knowledge are so important. Combined with important work towards a global network of scientific literature and knowledge (such as the Global Info Project), it can lead to a larger vision of interoperability of enduring, collaborative and personal knowledge; a bridging of Snow’s Two Cultures; a global information ecosystem; a truly semantic World Wide Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee.
I thank Professor Alfredo Ronchi (Milan) for inviting me to prepare this paper and Valentine Herman for inviting me to join his education panel within the culture track. I am grateful to my doctoral student, Nik Baerten for kindly preparing the plates. In addition I thank both him and my colleague, Drs. Johan van de Walle for reading a draft of the paper.
See Action line 4: Fast Internet for researchers and
students.
for
further articles.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Kim H. Veltman
Kim Veltman is Scientific Director of the Maastricht McLuhan Institute (MMI) and co-ordinator of a new European Network of Centres of Excellence in Digital Cultural Heritage.
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For citation purposes:
Veltman, K "Cultural and Historical Metadata: MEMECS (Metadonnées et Mémoire Collective Systématique)", Cultivate Interactive, issue
1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/memecs/>
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By Angela Spinazze - July 2000
CIMI is a consortium of cultural heritage institutions and organizations working together to promote interoperability and remove barriers to sharing valuable information [1]. In this article, Angela Spinazze introduces the five key program areas around which CIMI is based, focusing on the Test Bed experience to report on CIMI’s work with metadata and the Dublin Core.
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For over ten years, the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) Consortium has given the museum community a voice in shaping the digital future. A collaboration of cultural heritage institutions - museums, software developers and support organizations - CIMI is unique within the international cultural community. Membership is open to any institution, organization, corporation (for-profit or non-profit) or individual interested in and committed to standards based, open approaches to sharing cultural information. [2]
Consortium work is focused around five key areas: test beds, standards, current awareness, advocacy and education. Through these program areas, CIMI provides a research and development environment where museums can collaborate on testing new technologies, encourages the use of standards for sharing information, communicates with its members about issues of importance, voices the needs of the museum community within the global technology arena, and teaches the latest methods and processes so that new technologies can be skillfully applied within museums.
This article will discuss recent activities in each of these program areas.
The CIMI Dublin Core Metadata Test Bed began in March 1998 and ended in January 2000 [3]. Seventeen organizations participated, representing constituencies in Australia, Canada, Denmark, The Netherlands, Taiwan, United Kingdom and the United States. There were two phases to the project.
The first phase involved an in-depth exploration of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set [4] for resource discovery. Three assumptions served as the basis for this work:
The second phase involved investigating the use of qualifiers to aid in discovery of richer, more complex museum information. A set of assumptions, were defined.
There were many significant conclusions and outcomes from this test bed experience.
The DCMES provides a coarse set of categories designed for the purpose of resource discovery at the broadest possible level. CIMI endorses the use of the DCMES for this purpose. In addition, CIMI encourages museum professionals to recognize the importance of metadata and join us in implementing the element set according to the ‘best practices’ set out in the Guide to Best Practice: DC (more on the Guide below). Consensus and consistency in implementation is important to providing meaningful access to valuable resources.
The element set is not effective for discovery of complex, museum information. Attempts to extend the DCMES using Semantic Refinements resulted in violation of both the 1:1 and dumb down principles. There is a tension between the type of information that museums are used to sharing and the fundamental principles of the Dublin Core.
Value encoding schemes, on the other hand, are useful and work with the controlled vocabulary and thesauri practices already in place in museums. A more detailed discussion of these issues can be found in the test bed final report, available in several formats from the CIMI web site.
The results of the test bed took on many forms. They are listed here and are discussed in more detail throughout the remainder of this article.
CIMI has been creating, testing and implementing standards for information management and access in museums since its inception. Standards offer museums a means to communicate, interoperate, and collaborate. As noted above, the recent test bed project involved testing the Dublin Core metadata standard as well as XML to determine their efficacy for museums.
CIMI recommendations, standards and best practices most often are developed as a result of a test bed. This is the case with both the Guide to Best Practice: Dublin Core and the CIMI Dublin Core XML DTD.
The Guide to Best Practice: Dublin Core contains a museum-centric view of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set and provides guidance for implementing the standard in museums. DCMES v1.1 definitions are provided for each element along with a CIMI interpretation, definition and examples from the art, cultural and natural museum communities. The Guide is available for down load from the CIMI web site.
The CIMI Dublin Core XML DTD was developed as part of the database building exercise that occurred during the test bed. A database of Dublin Core records was created and used to test assumptions about the use of the Dublin Core for discovery of museum resources. The DTD is published as an Appendix to the Guide.
One way that CIMI communicates the results of test bed work and articulates issues of concern to the greater cultural community is through papers, reports, articles and through member and staff participation in cultural heritage and information technology conferences, workshops and meetings. CIMI members are active in many activities around the globe. Some of these activities are included here:
An article, published in the International Working Group of Taxonomic Databases by Neil Thomson, Head of Systems and Central Services, at CIMI member Natural History Museum, London (NHM) discussed the second phase of the test bed and specific issues of interest to the natural history community [8].
The experience working with XML to build a database of Dublin Core records is captured in an article by Bert Degenhart Drenth, Managing Director of CIMI member ADLIB Information Systems [9]. The article describes how XML was used in the test bed, provides insight into lessons learned and outlines some of the issues of particular concern when creating an XML DTD.
In May, CIMI participated in the Meta-Lib workshop held in Göttingen, Germany [10]. It was a wonderful opportunity to share with the library community the experiences of museums working with metadata and in particular, the Dublin Core.
Continuing on in this tradition, throughout the coming year CIMI will be issuing a series of briefing papers and bulletins authored both by CIMI members and by leading experts in a variety of fields. Topics will focus on contemporary problems surrounding issues such as digital art, archiving digital materials, digital library initiatives, wireless access devices and the like.
CIMI advocates to the international museum community by being a consistent voice for uses of technology that maintain the high standards that museums are known for. CIMI members participate, for example, in DCMI Working Groups and maintain representation in the Dublin Core Directorate, Usage and Advisory Committees. Through participation at this level, CIMI is able to keep abreast of current issues that can inform test bed initiatives as well as advocate for museum needs as standards evolve.
CIMI vendor members contribute to advocacy efforts by implementing new methods and processes into the products they develop for the museum community. CIMI members, ADLIB Information Systems, Intermuse, and Gallery Systems, participated in the CIMI Dublin Core Metadata Test Bed. As a result, DC export routines are now available for use with the collections information management systems produced by these vendors.
Founded in 1999, the CIMI institute is an educational outreach initiative. The Institute disseminates important information about the use of standards for resource discovery, information management and interoperability.
The first workshop series offers practical insights gained by the Test Bed experience. Test bed participants contributed to the development of a two day workshop designed to inform and educate museum professionals about the issues related to implementing the Dublin Core in museums. With support from the Getty Grant Program, six workshops were offered between September 1999 and June 1, 2000 with attendance by one hundred museum professionals from North America, Australia, and Europe. In addition, a one-day version of the workshop is being offered at both the CIDOC and mda conferences later this year.
The CIMI Dublin Core Metadata Test Bed project was a useful exercise to examine the efficacy of the DCMES for the museum community. The DCMES is useful at a coarse grain level for discovery of museum resources. CIMI endorses the use of the DCMES for broad level resource discovery and encourages the museum community to adopt its use according to the guidelines set out in the Guide to Best Practice: DC.
CIMI’s investigation of Semantic Refinements and Value Encoding Schemes resulted in the conclusion that for the discovery of rich, descriptive museum information, Semantic Refinements are not effective but Value Encoding Schemes are.
Building upon the results of the Dublin Core Metadata Test Bed, CIMI continues its investigation of how museums can exchange complex, domain specific information through the Museum Initiative for Digital Interchange Semantics and Syntax (MIDISS) project. The goals for this project are to scope the needs, possible services and issues related to proving rich museum information for a variety of applications. This step - finding the rich record - happens after the end user has discovered the resource using the Dublin Core. One application being considered in this research effort involves the ability for museums to deliver content to wireless devices.
A knowledge model will be developed representing the types of resources and associated complex descriptions. The rich descriptions of varying types will be tested against existing models such as the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, and the CIMI Access Points to determine points of convergence and efficacy. Eventually, the complex descriptions representing various resources found in museums will be rendered in XML and linked to the existing data base of Dublin Core records developed during the previous test bed.
Anticipated outcomes for this work include: a consensus on a suite of richer descriptions; the applications for which they may be used; and a greater understanding of the issues surrounding expressing this complex information in XML so that implementers can work together to design interoperable systems.
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Angela Spinazze
Programs Manager
CIMI Consortium
350 West Erie Street
Suite 250
Chicago
Illinois, 60657 USA
ats@atspin.com
<http://www.cimi.org/>
Phone: +1 312 944 6820
Angela Spinazze is Programs Manager for the CIMI Consortium. Her responsibilities include management and planning of test bed research and development and educational initiatives. In addition, she is involved directly with the museum community as a consultant specializing in interoperability and knowledge management issues.
Angela has worked within the cultural heritage community since 1986 and has a broad range of experience and expertise. She works with museums and cultural heritage organizations and her consulting focuses on issues related to knowledge management, strategies for integrated access to collections and institutional information, process re-engineering, data migration, and development planning.
Some of her recent projects include, strategic planning and process re-engineering with the Toledo Museum of Arts and managing the Quebec Museum Consortium data migration and collections application implementation initiative. In addition, she is Programs Manager for the CIMI Consortium.
She spent several years in the Annual Programs Department at The Art Institute of Chicago where she participated in initiatives that generated over $3,500,000 in revenue and 100,000 members for the museum. Also, at the Art Institute, she served as a core member of the first comprehensive physical inventory team. She participated in the design and development of a software application to facilitate the physical inventory of the collections and was responsible for the conversion of the museum’s collection records from paper to electronic format. In addition, Angela was Director of Marketing for Willoughby Associates, a developer of systems for collections management information.
Angela received her Bachelors of Arts from Miami University and her Masters of Arts in 19th and 20th Century Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago.
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For citation purposes:
Spinazze, A. "Collaboration, consensus and community: CIMI, museums and the Dublin Core",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/cimi/>
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By Leif Andresen & Ian Campbell-Grant - July 2000
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With the vast amount of information on the Internet metadata (that is data describing information) became an increasingly important subject over the last few years. The drive to exploit the World-Wide Web has created an urgent need for people and applications to collaborate together using the Web – and this needs standard methods and vocabularies for describing the Webs contents in a consistent and orderly manner in order to facilitate discovery.
Recognising the importance of metadata agreements for the European content industry, the European standards agency CEN decided to undertake an initial Workshop on Metadata in February 1998. This was to set a context for and make decisions on further work within CEN on metadata. In October 1999 a second Workshop was initiated recognizing that a particular highly relevant recent global activity is the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
Dublin Core is developed in an open consensus building environment and has been successfully applied in many countries and in many domains. The primary role of Dublin Core is to establish a de facto standard for metadata for discovery.
There is a natural development from de facto standards to formal standards. A very important detail of formal standardisation is the stability and the credibility of an official standard.
In September 1998 RFC 2413 Dublin Core Metadata for Resource Discovery was published. The Category of the RFC is Informational and it does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.
It was however an important step because it was the first formal acknowledgement from the world outside Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) has a platform for standardisation in information technology: ISSS (Information Society Standardization System). The mission of CEN/ISSS is to provide market players with a comprehensive and integrated range of standardisation-oriented services and products, in order to contribute to the success of the Information Society in Europe.
CEN/ISSS Workshops are open working groups aimed at producing specifications on a consensus basis, as pre-Standards, guidance or other material. The Workshops are open to all, the commitment to collaborate being the only criterion for participation. Workshops make intensive use of electronic working methods, enabling companies, organisations and academia to also participate without the need for attending the Workshops' meetings in person. CEN/ISSS Workshops produce CEN Workshop Agreements (CWAs), which are consensus-based specifications, drawn up in an open Workshop environment.
They are developed along straightforward lines, with a minimum of bureaucratic rules. CWAs may be the first attempt to prepare a European Standard; they may even contain competing solutions, in order to "test the market" for a technology or interface. They may also contain instructive material of a purely informative nature, such as Guidelines or Codes of Practice, or they may address the implementation of existing Standards.
A CWA reflects the consensus of identified companies and organisations responsible for its content. The CWA therefore does not represent as high a level of consensus as a European Standard (EN) and is not designed to support legislative requirements. Instead, its purpose is to offer market players a flexible and timely tool for achieving a technical agreement.
CEN Members (the National Standards Bodies) publish approved CWAs.
The CEN/ISSS Workshop on MMI (Metadata for Multimedia Information) started in February 1998 and completed its work in June 1999, having focused on developing a model for metadata, understanding the business requirements and the activities being undertaken in Europe and globally.
Deliverables from the Workshop are the two CWA’s Model for Metadata for Multimedia Information and Requirements for Metadata for Multimedia Information. In addition, a comprehensive framework giving brief explanations of key concepts and links to further resources was developed.
The work of the MMI group led to recognition that Dublin Core was a practicable and rapid route to a standard for Metadata discovery. The work of MMI therefore led to in a proposal for a new workshop with focus on Dublin Core. As part of these discussions it was decided to base the work on Dublin Core version 1.1. This version was published in July 1999. This was one of the reasons for not starting the next stage of work before summer 1999.
In October 1999 the MMI-work progressed with a new workshop focused on Dublin Core. The kick-off meeting of CEN/ISSS Workshop on Metadata in Multimedia Information - Dublin Core was held in Brussels in October 1999. The objectives of MMI Dublin Core stated in the business plan are:
As a first step, the Workshop have endorsed the Dublin Core specification (Version 1.1) as a CEN Workshop Agreement. That is CWA 13874 and more information is available in the press release [1].
Following this, the Workshop will in a second CEN Workshop Agreement provide instructive material on the adoption of Dublin Core metadata description within Europe. This involve the collection of information on state of the art in national implementations and deriving recommendations on co-ordination and other guidance information for European industry.
Finally, the Workshop will maintain and promote a knowledge base for metadata for multimedia information to continually assess relationships between Dublin Core and other initiatives in order to assist evolution of standardised metadata schemes. This knowledge base will identify the key activities currently being undertaken in Europe and across the world, the scope of these activities and related work in European projects and programmes.
The Workshop is open to, and seeks involvement from, all interested parties dealing with metadata standardisation. More than 150 IST-project have been invited to participate in the workshop.
If you would like to participate on behalf of your company or university in the activities of the MMI-DC Workshop, you should register as a Workshop participant via the on-line registration form on the MMI-DC Web-page [2].
The next meeting of the MMI-DC Workshop takes place on 27 + 28 June 2000. Chairman of the MMI-DC Workshop is Ian Campbell-Grant, ICL. Leif Andresen, Danish National Library Authority, is in charge of the MMI-DC Workshop Secretariat.
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Ian Campbell-Grant
ICL Fellow
ICL
Lovelace Road, Bracknell
Berkshire
RG12 8SN
UK
ian.campbell-grant@icl.com
Phone: +44 1344 472382
Telefax: +44 1344
Ian Campbell-Grant is the chairman of CEN/ISSS Workshop on Metadata for Multimedia Information - Dublin Core (MMI-DC)
Leif Andresen
Library Advisory Officer
Danish National Library Authority
Nyhavn 31 E, DK-1051 Copenhagen K
Denmark
lea@bs.dk
Phone direct: +45 3373 3354
Phone: +45 3373 3373
Telefax: +45 3373 3372
Leif Andresen manages the MMI-DC Workshop Secretariat (CEN/ISSS Workshop on Metadata for Multimedia Information - Dublin Core).
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For citation purposes:
Andresen, L & Campbell-Grant, I "Standardisation of Dublin Core in Europe",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/mmidc/>
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ISSN 1471-3225 |