Search Disabled |
|
|
|
Search Options | Help | Site Map | Cultivate Web Site | ||||
|
|
|||||
| Home | Current Issue | Index of Back Issues |
| Issue 6 Home | Editorial | Features | Regular Columns | News & Events | Misc. | ||
By Silke Grossmann, Vic Haesaerts, Gerda Koch and Walter Koch - February 2002
Silke Grossmann, Vic Haesaerts, Gerda Koch and Walter Koch report on the Regnet Project which aims to set up a functional network of service centres in Europe, providing IT-services dedicated to Cultural Heritage organisations.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The concept of a European Digital Library cannot only be based on a technical framework enabling access to digital goods – there is also a need to introduce new ways of cooperation between different stakeholders (Cultural Organisations, Industries, Administrations, etc.) as well as to “re-engineer” traditional business processes in the light of globalisation and world wide markets. The main activities within a support environment for I(nternet) Markets comprise of Content Engineering, Platform Engineering, and Enterprise Engineering.
The REGNET - Cultural Heritage in REGional NETworks project - targets all of above the three areas. The project was introduced under the Action Line ‘Access to digital collections of cultural and scientific content’ of the European Union IST-Information Society Technologies Programme and 23 partners, cultural organisations (museums, libraries and archives) and IT-industry representatives, from 10 European Union states as well as Bulgaria and Russia are participating. REGNET aims to set up a functional network of service centres in Europe, which provide IT-services dedicated to Cultural Heritage organisations and will be an enabler of e-Business activities for CH organizations. REGNET is a research and development project with a demonstration phase. It started April 1st 2001 and will last for two years. The whole project budget is above 5 Mio. EUR and 48,5% funded by the European Union. The Project Coordinator is AIT Applied Information Technique Research Ltd [1].
REGNET will set up a functional network of cultural service centres through Europe, which will provide IT-services dedicated to cultural heritage organisations. A technical and legal framework, the REGNET system, for such a service infrastructure will be developed. This will offer services like data entry, search and retrieval, and e-Business. It will be based mainly on integration work using state-of-the-art components. The network will integrate multi-media industries, content providers and service centre operators. Existing cultural infrastructures will be exploited and new infrastructures should be developed where necessary.
The technical infrastructure will allow the setting up of low cost service centres. The membership concept of the service centres will generate a critical mass of digital or physical goods contained in Content Provider's organisations.
The four players within the network are the content providers, the service centre operators, the system developers and end users. The content providers (museums, libraries, archives etc.) will provide access (via wired and wireless communication) to their digital contents, services and products and offer them to their clients (B2C). In return they can use the REGNET facilities for multimedia productions and database management, or cooperate with other REGNET partners during the creation of databases, generation of multimedia products or creation of a virtual exhibition (B2B). The service centre operators will generate income by providing the technical infrastructure (software/hardware) to content providers and other partners within the REGNET network. They offer additional IT-services and consultancies. And the system developers are selling the REGNET system to other cultural service centres and content providers. They implement additional components for the REGNET software system (additional ‘nodes’ like an ‘exhibition creator’, etc), and will generate income via licence fees for the REGNET system. For the end user the system will offer easy and wide access to cultural heritage (CH) data information and the purchase of CH related goods and services at one point, with stress on the production of personalized goods (e.g. CD-ROM) and services.
REGNET will also provide a unique facility for metadata definitions for both CH-related data and e-business related data via the search entry in the REGNET – Portal and the REGNET - Ontology subsystem. Here not only metadata related to objects is addressed, but also definitions of work flows, business processes, etc. are included which lead to the concept of Ontology within the Cultural Heritage domain. Within the project a data entry facility using Web-browsers and adaptable to different needs within different domains (Museums, Library, Archives) will be established. This facility will support existing standards (ICOM/CIDOC, UNIMARC, ISAD(G), etc) and is configurable by the REGNET System user. At the e-Business level REGNET provides the generation of a customised shopping cart systems within the business to consumer (B2C) framework.
REGNET will also examine how next generation mobile networks can be exploited to widen the potentiality of Web services in the field of Cultural Heritage. Appropriate gateway functions and interworking units will be envisaged to interface the REGNET architecture with the UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication Systems) structure and ensure a seamless provisioning of REGNET services to mobile customers.
Already existing electronic catalogues (OPACS: Online Public Access Catalogues) referring to cultural and scientific objects contained in libraries, museums, archives, and galleries, as well as to goods and services will be used. Where there are no catalogues yet new catalogues will be developed in order to establish a 'virtual union' catalogue of all OPACS and product/service catalogues held locally.
In addition the work includes the outlining of necessary 'supply chains' and the connected business processes and functions to deliver digital and physical goods. ADevelopment ll the business transactions on the B2B and B2C level (containing payment features, copyright systems, authentication control, etc) will be guided by a legal framework that will be worked out accordingly. The reorganisation of existing processes and introduction of computerised functions which make transactions for low money goods worth while (e.g. small copyright fees for digital images) is an essential part of the project.
The building blocks which constitute the REGNET-System are supporting access to cultural and scientific information as well as to product and service information offered by different organizations. The building blocks are outlined in the figure below. The REGNET-Portal enables entry of remote data, distributed search and e-business functions. The Cultural Heritage Data Management allows the search in distributed metadata repositories connected to data of cultural heritage content. The e-Business Data Management gives access to distributed goods and services catalogues via an e-business system. And the Ontology Checker contains specifications of metadata, terminologies etc. which are used in the e-business and cultural heritage field. Finally the Electronic Publisher allows the production of personalized digital products based on standardized metadata and work flows.
 |
REGNET extends the traditional access facilities to distributed heterogeneous catalogues by integration of product and service catalogues managed by e-business systems. Because of the large REGNET consortium real world tests covering 6 European regions (a dozen states) are possible.
The project will observe and take into account the ongoing and recent work of CEN/ISSS (Electronic Commerce Workshop) but will also look into recent activities like RosettaNet, eCo-Framework, OBI, etc.
REGNET will evaluate a networked organisation model (comparable to the Art Museums Image Consortium/AMICO in the United States) and the integration possibilities of tools and systems for co-operative working.
Within the REGNET system there are three building blocks which can be considered as vertical functions:
1) Content creation and management is based on actual standards efforts in the field of the different organisations involved. The inclusion of so called 'Dublin Core' metadata is as well an actual topic as the Z39.50/XML-related standardisation work is, which is targeted to a harmonised search and retrieval facility across different domains. REGNET may influence the development of a so called Z39.50/XML-application profile: the Bath-Profile. This technique, to make Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) interoperable, is essential to REGNET, since by this way the catalogue of the REGNET shopping system is generated dynamically according to the request of a user.
2) The platform management is based on up-to-date Internet technology and is the basis for the middle ware being the agent between content and service supplier and the requester (user). It is expected that during the implementation of REGNET the first large trials of systems following the OBI reference architecture will deliver results (RosettaNet).
3) The enterprise engineering will focus on some selected business processes and functional units: access to distributed catalogues, a shopping cart system, creation of a personalised catalogue based on retrieved data from the 'virtual catalogue' (in printed and electronic form), an Internet auction system (e.g. offering duplicates of posters), and a delivery system for physical goods (e.g. goods from museum stores).
On a 'horizontal' basis the XML/XSL-technology is used to structure data semantically and physically. This affects the creation of metadata, describing real (primary) objects (artefacts, naturefacts,...), media objects (photos, videos, ...) or bibliographic type objects (literature in the broadest sense). On the other hand all information within business transactions is wrapped within XML structures: Order, Invoice, Despatch, Report, ...). The recent developments in the field of XML/EDI standardisation will be used (ebXML). Another topic will be the definition of information products by appropriate document type definitions and style sheets. This should enable the 'non-media-professional' end user to easily generate catalogues or even CD-ROMs on demand. This might be the first step into the direction to create virtual exhibitions on demand by users themselves.
The scenarios outlined below can be considered as a first reference to e-Business processes only.
A tourist wants to buy articles related to the cultural heritage of a region; he/she is interested in physical goods from one or more museum shops as well as in specific surrogate (images) of cultural objects located in museums, archives, or libraries in the region. He/she can use a terminal at a tourist office where he/she searches the REGNET virtual catalogue for relevant images and information, browses for articles located in museum stores and places orders.
 |
A museum wants to produce a CDROM containing information about specific objects that he/she is interested in and which are related to a region.
The curator at the museum's side selects relevant information (text, images, films); he/she contacts a media producer, selects the basic layout/storyboard for the CDROM and works out together with the industrial partner - eventually with the help of other expert(s) - the final storyboard and the work flow necessary for the production process. He/she signs a contract for the production process and receives the master copy of the CDROM.
 |
The owner of a private collection wants to sell some of his/her assets on a maximum prize. He/She thinks about putting the offers on the Internet.
He/She digitises with the help of a REGNET-Partner (e.g. Cultural Service Centre/CSC) surrogates of the goods which will be sold. Additional information and expertises are gained after consultation of the Virtual Catalogue. An dedicated Internet Auction System is set up at an Cultural Service Centres (CSC) site and offers bidding to interested user communities. The marketing of this auction is supported by the CSC. This business case can be considered as combination of B2C and B2B functions and demonstrates that a stakeholder can obtain different roles in different business-cases.
 |
Electronic commerce, notably business to business e-commerce, is booming and world-wide e-commerce sales are expected to grow 40 times between 1998 and 2003 by which time they will become over 15% of all sales. The Internet and e-commerce are also leading to a surge in new company creation. The market for REGNET systems and services can to some extent be reckoned by the number of museums, libraries and archives in Europe. A rough estimation would deliver a potential number of 3.000 (15% of 20.000 museums) museum shops throughout Europe being candidates to be partner of the REGNET network!
“Content” is the basis for the planned REGNET portal and key success factor of the whole project. In order to make the system able to adapt to and compete on the market and to provide high quality digital assets and services the analysis of the available content at partner sites is - with regard to an effective content creation and content management - one of the main tasks in the project. The important decision to take consists in defining what objects or surrogates might attract potential users or could be a basis for follow up added value processing. The nature of data will not only be of cultural & scientific type; goods available in museum shops have to be documented too to provide Internet access to the museum shop. It might be useful not only store “primary” goods immediately for use of further processing, but also “eye catcher” suited to invoke a on demand process eventually doing a painting according to a theme offered in REGNET (“painting on demand”).
The analysis of collections and items located in libraries, museums, archives, research centres, etc. in a participating region was done by a multi-step approach (Figure 1).
 |
| Figure 1: Objectives of the audit concept of WP 1.1 |
The chosen methodology sought to describe not only the current practises (the status quo) at the side of the content providers in different domains but also to provide a guide on international best practise regarding the usage of the Internet for presentation of collections (search and browse), communication and interaction with potential users, e-Commerce-transactions etc. By examining and documenting the State-of-the-Art in the cultural sector an orientation on well established trends and methods should be assured and features be identified to be applied for the REGNET system. The overall goal was to derive and to define functional requirements for the REGNET system.
As part of the envisaged system the theme-based approach was developed - the idea and the aim behind was to deliver further added value in areas such as education, electronic publishing and virtual exhibitions. The themes should deliver supporting material in selling pieces of art or surrogates, offer new possibilities in the area of cultural tourism and realize innovative access methods to search for art objects (paints, sculptures, installations, net art, design, ceramics, jewellery etc.), museum objects, physical goods in the museum shops, photography and library collections (e. g. books, manuscripts and maps). The theme-based approach will be described in chapter xy ).
All participating content providers could provide normally more than one collection – the challenge was to select assets which fit to the envisaged clientele. Due to the fact that almost all content providers directly involved started digitisation activities but not finished them it was necessary to try to achieve some critical mass also by complementing the different offerings.
Once it is clarified what material is going into the REGNET repositories concrete guidelines based on best practice experiences have to be developed. The recommendations and guidelines to be worked out should be based on two basic principles: efficiency and cost effectiveness. Because collections differ widely in their types of material, audience, and institutional purpose, specific practices may vary from institution to institution as well as for different collections within a single institution. Therefore, the sets of recommendations must be broad enough to apply to most cases, and try to synthesize the differing recommendations previously made for specific target collections/audiences.
The "general" digitisation plan should serve as an guideline for all digitisation activities in the REGNET project. The general policy of digitisation in the project and selections with regard to content and technological issues are described. The digitisation plan lists all tasks (which can be tackled in sequence or in parallel) valid for digitisation projects in general. The "modules" of the general digitisation plan should allow to convert any individual collection according to the described procedures by considering the large number of variables, driven by the priorities, the institution, user needs, technical issues and available funding. It should help to consider all things needed to build up a digital collection: from the collection itself, the data that describes the objects and the user groups. Such a systematic planning should provide the basis for high quality content!
The thematic approach of cultural heritage information within REGNET is based on a cultural heritage data triangle. This triangle consists of “themes”, “thematic texts” and “collection object images & descriptions”(see figure REGNET – Cultural heritage data triangle).
Whereas collection objects images and descriptions pertain in most cases strictly to the objects themselves (see the equivalence with the standard collection management systems fundamentals), thematic texts are delivering supplementary and contextual information related to an object or to a set of objects. Moreover, these thematic texts are set up in a way that they can be reused for different contextual views and situations.
In contrast with collection objects and thematic texts, which contain real basic descriptive information about something, themes reflect the scope, resource locations and relationships of all this descriptive information. By their nature, themes are part of the Ontology function of the REGNET system. On a more practical side, a theme can be considered as a collection of thematic texts and/or objects that have one or more characteristics (“keywords”) in common. One can easily understand that with this approach the theme concept is quite flexible and that a single thematic text can show up in different contexts. Themes can either refer to thematic texts only, or to collection objects only or, in most cases, to both, thematic texts and collection objects. The term “fragment” reflects best the “building block”-functionality, vis-à-vis the themes, of those thematic texts and collection objects.
Applying this theme-fragment approach on a search into a collection databases, a user can gain access in an indirect way to the objects via themes and thematic texts in addition to the standard direct search through the same objects. The opposite, accessing information contained in themes and thematic texts through the objects’ databases, is also possible.
 |
| REGNET - Cultural heritage data triangle |
A theme, in the concept of REGNET, should not be defined as a predefined hierarchy of a set of thematic texts and collection objects with fixed relationships. The constituting parts of themes should be build up of data containing a set of keywords that reflect the main content, the main idea of it. Those parts can be (automatically or manually) grouped together into a theme by the keywords that accompany them. One can easily imagine that a text that has been written as part of a range of texts about measuring time can also show up as part of a theme about famous scientists. A contribution about a certain saint can show up in a theme about things or persons of which people believe that they will give protection.
However, in order to achieve quickly a coherent and consistent entity of related information, the production of texts and the digitising of objects has to be done following a certain top down approach (« » the keyword bottom up approach described higher). Hereby each content provider has to choose a central theme with a set of related themes, within which she/he can develop a substantial number of relevant thematic texts and related objects.
The data entry part of themes has many facets and varies from scanning and OCR, over on line Z39.50 connections, to specific fragment data entry and topic map generation. The use of themes in outputting something interferes with a lot of functions incorporated in the REGNET system as can be seen in the figure “Theme mapping to functionalities”. Themes, together with the thematic texts and the objects, can as well deliver constituting parts for Search & Retrieval and Publishing as offer supporting material for the e-Business part.
 |
| REGNET - Theme mapping to functionalities |
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Silke Grossmannn
Silke Grossmannn works for IMAC, Constance as a Project Manager / Consultant. She is the Project manager, responsible for the field of electronic markets, a Consultant in the field of information and knowledge management and offers Training: Themes: Information delivery in online services, Internet-Information systems, Intranets and in the use of new media. She is participating in the following projects: building of an online community in Switzerland (Arte 24), Consultation of museums on the application of new media, development of a software system for museums (Museums Access), creating a variety of projects in the area of Online-Services (information needs analyses, conception of information services and systems, evaluation of information services and systems). Realization of an empirical study in the field of regional and specialized electronic markets, conception and realization of different types of electronic markets (needs analysis, definition of a portfolio for an offer, creation of a business plan, project management in the realization and application of a marketing strategy). Participation in EU-Projects: NBE-BIS, ETTN, DeMes.
Prior to joining IMAC Silke worked at the University of Constance as a Lecturer in Information mediation and as a Scientific assistant to Prof. Rainer Kuhlen, Creating and updating Web sites about the online and information market. Before this she was a Librarian working in Information structure and classification, formal and technical cataloging
Vic Haesaerts
Vic Haesaerts has a degree in Electronic Engineering. He has considerable experience in the management of innovative projects in the telecommunications and banking sector. His research activities have mainly been focused on artificial intelligence techniques and electronic distribution channels. At the moment he is the managing director of Tarx and an expert-evaluator for European projects.
Walter Koch
kochw@ait.co.at
Professor Walter Koch received a PhD in Mathematics and Physics from University of Graz in 1970. He is shareholder and director for AIT Research Ltd. (Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesellschaft mbH.), and is an Associate Professor at the University of Graz and a Guest Professor at the University of Krems. Prof. Koch's relevant experience includes: heading different research institutes at JOANNEUM RESEARCH Ltd, working as a Consultant to different national and international organizations (eg UNESCO, DFG, EC, Austrian ministries, Graz municipality). He is a member of several international and international scientific associations (eg. ICOM, ÖGDI, ONORM, VÖB, UNESCO). Walter has a vast amount of project experience in bibliographic information, information systems, IT-management, EU Projects (TAP, Raphael, TenTelecom; IST), ESA, CIMI. He is the overall Project Co-ordinator and managert of the EU-project REGNET, Cultural Heritage in Regional Networks. He is also a personal consultant to the EU-Project DIGICULT. Walter has published more than 70 papers and technical reports, and presented papers in four continents at least at 100 conferences, seminars and workshops.
Gerda Koch
kochg@ait.co.at
Gerda Koch received a Master of Arts in English with a combination of studies in Economics and Law at the University of Graz, and also received an academic degree in a course of studies on Multimedia at the University of Graz. Gerda has been employed at AIT, Applied Information Technique Ltd since 1991. There she has worked on diverse informatics projects, for example a production automation system for a window-producing company, the database publishing production of the yearly published Austrian Statistics on Non-University Education. She also collaborated in the European Union TenTelecom project MOSAIC (Museums Over States And vIrtual Culture) for the Austrian partner of the project.
Since 1998 Gerda Koch has been managing director of AIT Ltd. She now focuses on cultural digital content provision whilst working on the national project MODOK (Modular Documentation System) for the Austrian Ministry of Science and Traffic and the EU-project COVAX (Contemporary Culture Virtual Archive in XML). Within the EU-project REGNET, Cultural Heritage in Regional Networks Gerda Koch is also responsible for co-ordination and project management.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
For citation purposes:
Grossman, S., Haesaerts, V., Koch, G., and Koch, W. "Cultural Heritage in Regional Networks: The REGNET Project", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/regnet/>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Related articles:
If you would like to view similar articles to this one click on a key word below:
< - regnet - xml - networks - >
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
|