How Digital Cultural Heritage Resources can Lead to New Understandings in the Humanities: Future Challenges for Digital Libraries and Archives (Invited Paper)

This paper reports on the presentation made during the panel on "Digital Libraries and Digital Archives: Problems and Challenges for AI Approaches" of the 1st Workshop on Intelligent Techniques At LIbraries and Archives (ITALIA 2015) co-located with the XIV Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, 22 September 2015, Ferrara, Italy

HILT IV : subject interoperability through building and embedding pilot terminology web services

A report of work carried out within the JISC-funded HILT Phase IV project, the paper looks at the project's context against the background of other recent and ongoing terminologies work, describes its outcome and conclusions, including technical outcomes and terminological characteristics, and considers possible future research and development directions. The Phase IV project has taken HILT to the point where the launch of an operational support service in the area of subject interoperability is a feasible option and where both investigation of specific needs in this area and practical collaborative work are sensible and feasible next steps. Moving forward requires detailed work, not only on terminology interoperability and associated service delivery issues, but also on service and end user needs and engagement, service sustainability issues, and the practicalities of interworking with other terminology services and projects in UK, Europe, and global contexts

HILT : High-Level Thesaurus Project. Phase IV and Embedding Project Extension : Final Report

Ensuring that Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) users of the JISC IE can find appropriate learning, research and information resources by subject search and browse in an environment where most national and institutional service providers - usually for very good local reasons - use different subject schemes to describe their resources is a major challenge facing the JISC domain (and, indeed, other domains beyond JISC). Encouraging the use of standard terminologies in some services (institutional repositories, for example) is a related challenge. Under the auspices of the HILT project, JISC has been investigating mechanisms to assist the community with this problem through a JISC Shared Infrastructure Service that would help optimise the value obtained from expenditure on content and services by facilitating subject-search-based resource sharing to benefit users in the learning and research communities. The project has been through a number of phases, with work from earlier phases reported, both in published work elsewhere, and in project reports (see the project website: http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/). HILT Phase IV had two elements - the core project, whose focus was 'to research, investigate and develop pilot solutions for problems pertaining to cross-searching multi-subject scheme information environments, as well as providing a variety of other terminological searching aids', and a short extension to encompass the pilot embedding of routines to interact with HILT M2M services in the user interfaces of various information services serving the JISC community. Both elements contributed to the developments summarised in this report

Access to Digital Cultural Heritage: Innovative Applications of Automated Metadata Generation Chapter 1: Digitization of Cultural Heritage – Standards, Institutions, Initiatives

The first chapter "Digitization of Cultural Heritage – Standards, Institutions, Initiatives" provides an introduction to the area of digitisation. The main pillars of process of creating, preserving and accessing of cultural heritage in digital space are observed. The importance of metadata in the process of accessing to information is outlined. The metadata schemas and standards used in cultural heritage are discussed. In order to reach digital objects in virtual space they are organized in digital libraries. Contemporary digital libraries are trying to deliver richer and better functionality, which usually is user oriented and depending on current IT trend. Additionally, the chapter is focused on some initiatives on world and European level that during the years enforce the process of digitization and organizing digital objects in the cultural heritage domain. In recent years, the main focus in the creation of digital resources shifts from "system-centred" to "user-centred" since most of the issues around this content are related to making it accessible and usable for the real users. So, the user studies and involving the users on early stages of design and planning the functionality of the product which is being developed stands on leading position

DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field

Implementing the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) for accessibility and reuse of cultural heritage resources on the web – Challenges and Advantages

The accessibility of images-based resources is important for the practice of research, teaching and knowledge transfer in the Social Sciences and the Humanities. In the past twenty-five years, Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs) have been digitizing and providing millions of digital surrogates of their artefacts, paintings, books, maps, manuscripts and other objects in digital repositories and web platforms. However, most of those digital resources are still locked up in silos which means they lack interoperability and reusability. To address this issue, the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) was created in 2011 by technologists from Stanford University, The British Library and The Bodleian Library, The National Library of Norway and The National Library of France (BnF). This study will address the challenges and advantages of the IIIF’s implementation in digital repositories of CHIs and how the IIIF can enhance research, teaching and knowledge transfer in the social sciences and humanities. This study will also look at the IIIF implementation scenario in Europe and in Portugal through qualitative analysis of professionals’ responses to a questionnaire.A acessibilidade de recursos baseados em imagens é importante para a prática da investigação, ensino e transferência de conhecimentos nas Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Nos últimos vinte e cinco anos, as Instituições de Património Cultural (CHIs) têm vindo a digitalizar e a fornecer milhões de substitutos digitais dos seus artefactos, pinturas, livros, mapas, manuscritos e outros objetos em repositórios digitais e plataformas web. No entanto, a maioria desses recursos digitais ainda se encontram encerrados em silos, o que significa que lhes falta interoperabilidade e reutilização. Para abordar esta questão, o International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) foi criado em 2011 por tecnólogos da Universidade de Stanford, The British Library e The Bodleian Library, The National Library of Norway e The National Library of France (BnF). Este estudo abordará os desafios e vantagens da implementação do IIIF em repositórios digitais de instituições culturais e universidades e como o IIIF pode melhorar a investigação, o ensino e a transferência de conhecimento nas ciências sociais e humanas. Este estudo analisará também o cenário de implementação da IIIF em Portugal através da análise qualitativa das respostas dos profissionais a um questionário

TOWARDS IMPLEMENTING VIRTUAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURES – A CASE STUDY WITH iRODS

Scientists demand easy-to-use, scalable and flexible infrastructures for sharing,managing and processing their data spread over multiple resources accessiblevia different technologies and interfaces. In our previous work, we developedthe conceptual framework VISPA for addressing these requirements. This paperprovides a case study assessing the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System(iRODS) for implementing the key concepts of VISPA. We found that iRODSis already well suited for handling metadata and sharing data. Although it doesnot directly support provenance information of data and the temporal provisioningof data, basic forms of these capabilities may be provided through itscustomization mechanisms, ie rules and micro-services

Differences Between Human Oriented and Machine Oriented Information Standards: Implications for Design of Enterprise-Scale Information Systems

Enterprise-scale information systems are deeply entwined with the networks of social practice that use and support them. Yet “interoperability” between information systems and social communities of practice is not always easily achieved, because these disparate types of entities operate according to different logics and respond differently to innovation processes. In this paper we identify differences between the types of information standards used in information systems and those commonly used within social communities of practice, terming the former “machine oriented standards” and the latter “human oriented standards.” We then provide a catalog of commonly used human oriented standards. We conclude by suggesting that these distinctions have significant implications for designers and developers of enterprise-scale information standards and information systems