Place, Cultural Heritage and the Internet

Arrival

Arrival and registration. Snacks will be served.

Introduction and Tour de Table

Joachim Korb, AIT

Europeana

David Haskiya, Europeana Foundation

This presentation will provide background information about the Europeana project, the vision guiding it and the cluster of projects supporting it with content and technologies. Further, the presentation will give an overview of Europeana's winter 2010-2011 development programme (called the Danube programme) giving a picture of the main areas we focus our development resources on. Finally, the presentation will also touch upon the geospatial aspects of Europeana in terms of: the Europeana Data Model (EDM), enrichment of metadata to create geodata, end user functions allowing spatial browsing of Europeana content and the Europeana search API.

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EuropeanaConnect

Joachim Korb, AIT

This talk will present an overview of the EuropeanaConnect project with a focus on GIS-related tasks and the project's activities of networking and clustering.

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Geographic Information in the Carare and Athena Projects

Franc Zakrajsek

The Carare project excellently started few months ago under Europeana umbrella. The main issue of the project is to bring the most important digital information of immovable cultural heritage as are architectural buildings and archeological sites in Europeana. The geographic location is core data of this collections. The presentation shall put forward:

• draft Carare metadata concerning geographical information
• Inspire directive and Carare project
• first analysis of Carare content - survey results and examples on geographical information

The second part shortly demonstrates the Guidelines for geografic location of cultural content intended for movable cultural heritage and especially for museums, libraries, archives and other cultural institutions, which are introducing geographic information system. The content of presentation is as follows:

• goals, standards of geographic information in digital cultural content
• geographic information in Athena content
• possible geographic information system models and implementation

The Guidelines has been prepared within Athena project as a part of Europaena projects framework.

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Spatial Navigation of Cultural Heritage

Runar Bergheim, Asplan Viak Internet

Experiences from use and re-use of spatial metadata in natural- and cultural heritage projects in Norway and throughout the North Sea region including different practices in entry/maintenance of spatial metadata in legacy databases, approaches to spatial metadata enrichment and various end-user interfaces using the spatial paradigm as a driver for exploration of cultural heritage.

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Coffee Break

Cartographic Perspectives on Cultural Heritage

Manuela Schmidt, Institute for Geoinformation and Cartography at Vienna University of Technology

The presentation will give a short overview on the challenges and research questions in cultural heritage in conjunction with cartography, accompanied by some project examples. The activities of the International Cartographic Association's commission on "Digital Technologies in Cartographic Heritage" will be outlined.

Note: This talk is merged with next talk - Preservation in Digital Cartography

Preservation in Digital Cartography

Markus Jobst, Vienna University of Technology / Austrian Federal Agency for Metrology and Surveying

The survival of digital cartographic heritage will base on long-term preservation strategies that make use of extensive dissemination on one hand and sustainable digital archiving methods on the other. This includes a massive development of paradigm that expands from "store-and-save" to "keep-it-online". The paradigm "store-and-save" is mainly used for analogue masters that consist of storage media, like vellum, and their visible content. Avoiding the storage media from degeneration in climate-controlled areas will help to keep the content accessible. In the digital domain the high interdependency of storage media, format, device and applications leads to the paradigm "keep-it-online" which for example describes the migration to new storage devices.

The topics of this presentation span from a prospective cartographic heritage's complexity, aspects of geospatial preservation, problems in keeping digital cartography online to pragmatic considerations for a prospective cartographic heritage. The content of this presentation is based on the contributions of the book "preservation in digital cartography", which describes and helps to identify main foci of preservation in digital cartography supported by state-of-the-art practices and experience reports.

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The MapRank Search and the Georeferencer Online Service

Petr Přidal, Klokan Technologies GmbH

The MapRank Search is a geographical search engine with support for spatial ranking. It is designed directly for efficient and intuitive search in large map collections and geodata catalogs. Users just browse on a map and choose geographical area of interest and optionally also time period, tags or fulltext query and the system is in real time presenting the most relevant records from the indexed (potentially very large) metadata catalog. MapRank Search was developed by Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland. The pilot web application is indexing union catalog of all Swiss libraries.

The Georeferencer is a collection of online tools which allow rapid collaborative georeferencing, bookmarking, 3D visualization and cartometric accuracy analysis of existing high-resolution images of scanned maps which are already published on the web. It is also possible to visually integrate historical map layers, overlay these on top of Google Maps and similar base maps or provide OGC WMS for further research in GIS applications. The tools run in the cloud and are available directly from a web browser environment, without a need of installing any software on a local computer. An alpha version of the described online service is already available for testing by general public. The development continues as part of the R&D project OldMapsOnline.org, conducted by Moravian Library in Brno, Czech Republic.

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3D Reconstruction of and for Cultural Heritage

Georg Rothwangle, VRVis

Nowadays things tend to be first created in a computer and only later as real objects. Historical objects - especially complex ones - are a challenge to be digitally reproduced. One way to make real objects into virtual one is through 3D reconstruction. In this talk I will present different technical aspects as well as results from different multi-disciplinary research projects.

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Watch Video Demo 1

Watch Video Demo 2

Discussion and Next Steps

Summary of highlights of day 1, preparation for day 2 and open-ended discussion. Refreshments will be served.

Arrival

Arrival and Coffee

An End-User Annotation and Exploration Tool for Digitised Old Maps

Rainer Simon, AIT

The practice of annotation has traditionally been playing a crucial role in the cultural heritage domain: on the one hand, annotations enable scholars to share and exchange knowledge, and work collaboratively in the interpretation and analysis of cultural heritage artefacts. On the other hand, annotations are a valuable addition to traditional metadata, which is essential for organising and cataloguing, as well as for searching and retrieving of objects in cultural heritage collections.

This talk presents a Web-based system for annotating digitised old maps. The system enables users to add free-text annotations as well as structured semantic tags to regions on the map in an intuitive, effortless way. Furthermore, the tool provides a number of geo-related functionalities such as geo-referencing, geographical search, vector data overlay and export of annotations to a geographical data format.

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Annotations, Linked Data, and Location Information

Bernhard Haslhofer, University of Vienna

Linked Data is about exposing and connecting data on the Web. Within three years the Linked Data idea gained momentum and lead to the availability of structured data from various domains. Prominent examples are DBpedia, the structured representation of Wikipedia, or Geonames, which is a freely available worldwide geographical database. In the annotation tools we are currently building for Europena, we exploit existing Linked Data sources in order to enrich user-provided textual comments with contextual information, such as Wikipedia entities or geo-coordinates for places. Furthermore, we expose the annotations created with our tools as Linked Data on the Web, which makes them exchange- and reusable in a simple and straightforward way.

This talk will briefly introduce the technical principles of Linked Data and show how we apply them in the context of multimedia annotations. It will cover recent developments in the area of Open Annotations (OAC model) and give an overview of existing Linked Data sources that provide geographical information.

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The MEKETREpository - A Collaborative Web Database for Middle Kingdom Scene Descriptions

Christian Mader, University of Vienna

The MEKETRE project is an interdisciplinary research project between the Institute of Egyptology and the Department of Distributed and Multimedia Systems at the University of Vienna. It seeks to systematically collect, describe and compare wall decorations of Egyptian Tombs of the Middle Kingdom (MK). The MEKETREpository constitutes the technical part of the project. It is implemented as a Webapplication that supports Egyptologists in collaboratively describing MK art-items in a structured way. It also features a Google-like search interface in combination with a faceted search which allows the interested public to intuitively query the collected data. Additionally the material is made publicly available on the Web as Linked Data. We utilize existing controlled vocabularies in describing the content but also support extending these vocabularies and the creation of a custom categorization scheme.

The talk will give a short overview on what kind of data the MEKETREpository is designed to contain and how this data is described. In a demonstration typical use-cases are presented in order to get an idea about the expected workflow concerning adding, annotating and finding art-items. Furthermore an outlook on planned features and future work including possible integration of geolocation information will be provided.

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Coffee Break

New Interaction Methods for Location-Based Services in a Mobile Environment and their Evaluation

Dennis Heinen, OFFIS

Modern smartphones and the mobile web have created an emerging market for mobile location-based services. As technology evolves, there is a potential for new interaction paradigms and approaches to enhance these services. This talk will outline our work on a mobile access channel for Europeana as well as present some of our research results on non-visual interaction methods, new approaches for Point of Interest (POI) presentation and their evaluation.

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Getting Context on the Go - Mobile Urban Exploration with Ambient Tag Clouds

Matthias Baldauf, Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien

Tag clouds are a well-established concept for organizing and visualizing large amounts of user-generated content annotated with keywords. Applied on mobile devices, so-called 'ambient tag clouds' which are based on surrounding georeferenced and tagged resources may act as compact location descriptors. This talk presents our on-going work towards more expressive ambient tag clouds. By analyzing locative textual Web content, such representations summarizing available background information can be generated without explicitly assigned tags. Thus, these ambient tag clouds enable the mobile exploration of a place's semantic beyond visible objects and common points-of-interest.

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Closing

Summary of workshop and preparation for workshop report including lunch.

Optional Social Programme

Guided tour of the Globe Museum of the Austrian National Library.