GLAMTLV2018/Submissions/EVA Minerva – A European Horizon

Submission no. 77

Title of the submission

EVA Minerva – A European Horizon

Etherpad

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Author(s) of the submission

Pavel Kats (1), Alexander Raginsky (2), Dov Winer (3), Marco Rendina (4), Dr. Susan Hazan (5) Moderator: Liam Wyatt

E-mail address

shazannetvision.net.il

Country of origin

Israel (and others)

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

1. Jewish Historical Museum Amsterdam
2. PANGEANIC
3. Jewish Heritage Network/Judaica Europeana
4. European Fashion Heritage Association
5. ViMM Working Group Chair/The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

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Type of session

Panel

Length of session

60 min.

Ideal number of attendees

30-40

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Abstract

Hundreds, if not thousands of cultural heritage projects spring up across the European digital ecosystem every year. Keeping a track of the latest innovations can be often challenging. In the EVA/Minerva tradition, this panel brings together European and local speakers to reflect the latest projects and activities across the European networks.

Culture Chatbot - Europeana Multilingual

Speaker: Pavel Kats, Alexander Raginsky, Dov Winer

Conversational interfaces, or chatbots, are increasingly becoming a popular interface to interact with users in ecommerce, online banking, transportation, healthcare and other industries. Chatbots are using natural language to converse with users, understand their needs and provide them with information and services. In this project we want to exploit the potential of conversational interfaces for engaging users with cultural heritage content provided by Europeana and other cultural organisations. We will do this by building, deploying, evaluating, and maintaining Culture Chatbot - Europeana Multilingual Chatbot, a standalone chatbot platform that will be interacting with online users on a variety of online platforms - websites, social media, instant messaging tools - providing an easy, guided and novel access to cultural heritage content, coming from Europeana, its aggregators and other cultural heritage institutions. The chatbot will guide users, using an intuitive natural-language interface, across Europeana collections, allowing them to discover new cultural heritage resources, based on their expressed interests. The chatbot service will use the Europeana API to access the vast amount of cultural heritage content stored in Europeana, benefitting from the support for rich semantic modeling and multilingual metadata offered by the API, in order to provide guided access to cultural heritage resources, further applying state-of-the-art open-source semantic technologies to develop a novel user interaction. The technology and the service will be deployed and will be evaluated in three different user scenarios (leisure, education and research). In addition to English, the chatbot service initially will be developed to interact in three European languages: Dutch, Italian and Polish.

CrowdHeritage: A CrowdSourcing Platform for Enriching Europeana Metadata

Speaker: Marco Rendina

Data quality is among Europeana’s top prioritιes for its 2015-2020 Strategy and a crucial concern for domain, thematic, and national aggregators. The lack of granular and rich descriptive metadata highly affects the searchability and usability of the digital content stored in Europeana, thus often frustrating the user experience on the Europeana Collections portal. In this context, crowdsourcing can offer a great opportunity for improving the metadata quality of content stored in the Europeana platform in a scalable way, while at the same time engaging different user communities and raising awareness about cultural heritage assets. CrowdHeritage proposes to develop an effective web platform with the aim to mobilise users to execute useful tasks for the enrichment and validation of selected cultural heritage metadata, targeting different audiences (e.g. researchers, teachers, students, culture lovers, etc.) and focusing on four themes: Fashion, Music, European cities and Sports. The objective is to actively engage different target communities in enhancing the metadata of selected content, evaluate the usability of the platform and asses the effectiveness of the overall approach both in terms of data quality improvement and user engagement.

Europeana Media

Speaker: Marco Rendina

Audiovisual media objects are powerful primary sources of entertainment, information and creativity. They show Europe in all of its facets: fiction, reality, politics, high culture and daily life. Today, Europeana provides access to 1.1 million videos and 735k audio recordings. Access statistics on the Europeana Collections portal have consistently reported a greater interest in these items over image and text. However, there are three shortcomings in user experience that stop AV material from reaching its full potential:

1. differing playout services used by content providers;
2. current playout on Europeana offers no additional features that make AV more appealing and reusable;
3. AV content reuse is often hindered by not always providing clear information about allowed options for reuse.

Europeana Media addresses these through the development of an Enhanced Unified Playout Service (EUPS) for time-based media. This service offers an interoperable and sustainable solution for AV media playout, providing ease of use, intuitive design and functionalities tailored specifically to Europeana’s key stakeholders. In particular, it delivers a suite of functionalities that offer researchers, educators and citizens the possibility to better access and incorporate AV content from Europeana into their working environments, such as: offering video fragment quoting, support for subtitling, and embedding media. In addition, The Enhanced Unified Playout Service will be integrated into the Europeana Core platform, ensuring long-term sustainability.

ViMM - Virtual Multimodal Museums

Speaker: Dr. Susan Hazan

The Virtual Multimodal Museum (ViMM) is a high-visibility and participative Coordination and Support Action (CSA), funded under the EU Horizon 2020 programme (CULT-COOP-8-2016). ViMM brings together Europe and the world’s leading public and private sector organisations working on Virtual Museums and in the wider sector of Digital Cultural Heritage, to support high quality policy development, decision making and the use of technical advances. The partner consortium is supported by an expert Advisory Group in building the ViMM Framework, involving decision-makers and expert practitioners in defining and resolving pertaining to the Museum community.

This presentation will present the results of WORKING GROUP 1.1 – WHAT IS A VIRTUAL MUSEUM and the crossover with Wikipedia as the seamless platform that is ideally poised to disseminate the definition of a Virtual Museum.  At a recent meeting in Berlin, a call to action went out across the many partner states to upload a translated version of the definition the many languages of the participants of the ViMM Network to upload a translation of the Virtual Museum Working Definition in order to test the it across the Museum community wherever they may be located and in any language they might speak. This is an ongoing call to action and the GLAMTLV2018 would be an ideal moment to encourage the dissemination of the ViMM definition of a virtual Museum in the various languages in order to stimulate discussion across the community. In addition to the definition, this presentation will describe the ViMM Manifesto and Roadmap that set out new expressions and materializations of the future of virtual museums.

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