D7.3 Training materials

This Deliverable gives a detailed description of the comprehensive training programme and of the open educational content that the University of Padua has accomplished up to now for the project "Linked Heritage: Coordination of standard and technologies for the enrichment of Europeana" (CIP Best Practice Network). The final version of D7.3 will be released by the end of the project, when all the Learning Objects will be finished

Amsterdam Museum Linked Open Data

In this document we describe the Amsterdam Museum Linked Open Data set. The dataset is a five-star Linked Data representation and comprises the entire collection of the Amsterdam Museum consisting of more than 70,000 object descriptions. Furthermore, the institution's thesaurus and person authority files used in the object metadata are included in the Linked Data set. The data is mapped to the Europeana Data Model, utilizing Dublin Core, SKOS, RDA-group2 elements and the OAI-ORE model to represent the museum data. Vocabulary concepts are mapped to GeoNames and DBpedia. The two main contributions of this dataset are the inclusion of internal vocabularies and the fact that the complexity of the original dataset is retained

Digital Collections Service for the ROSSIO Infrastructure

Nowadays, especially during these challenging pandemic times, the need to have valuable cultural assets preserved online and available for current and future generations has grown exponentially. Cultural and educational sectors faced unprecedented obstacles as a result of the pandemic’s containment measures since many physical places such as schools, libraries, and museums had little choice but to close temporarily. Digital media has played a vital role in people’s daily interactions and was essential for the affected sectors to continue their work remotely. The pandemic has given an opportunity for cultural heritage organizations to show the benefits of digital collections and resources. By increasing access to a multitude of resources, spotlighting "hidden gems", preserving content, giving students digital materials to learn from, and providing users a different view on cultural heritage, the digital libraries and their digital collections have demonstrated how much they can enable a rich and diverse public domain. This Master’s dissertation was developed in collaboration with the ROSSIO infrastruc- ture, intending to create a service for their platform that allows the creation of digital collections made up of cultural heritage resources gathered by ROSSIO and its partner institutions. The developed service aims to give authenticated users access to an intuitive interface that includes the tools they need to create, edit, and share collections with the public, showcasing the best of Portugal’s cultural heritage in thematic collections that anyone can explore, enjoy and share.Hoje em dia, especialmente durante estes tempos difíceis de pandemia, a necessidade de ter artigos culturais valiosos preservados online e disponíveis, tanto para gerações atuais como futuras, tem aumentado exponencialmente. Devido às medidas de confinamento impostas durante a pandemia, tanto o sector cultural como o educacional teve de enfrentar desafios sem precedentes, uma vez que muitos locais físicos como escolas, bibliotecas e museus não tiveram outra opção que não fosse fechar temporariamente. Os meios digitais têm sido sem dúvida importantes para as interacções diárias entre as pessoas e foram essenciais para que os sectores afectados pudessem continuar o seu trabalho remotamente. A pandemia deu uma oportunidade para as organizações de património cultural mostrarem os benefícios de coleções e recursos digitais. Ao aumentar o acesso a uma infinidade de recursos, destacando "gemas escondidas", preservando o conteúdo, dando aos alunos materiais digitais para estudar e fornecendo aos utilizadores uma visão diferente sobre o património cultural, as bibliotecas digitais e suas coleções digitais demonstraram o quanto podem contribuir para um domínio público rico e diversificado. Esta dissertação de Mestrado foi desenvolvida em colaboração com a infraestrutura ROSSIO, com o objetivo de desenvolver um serviço na sua plataforma que permita a criação de coleções digitais, compostas por recursos patrimoniais culturais recolhidos pela ROSSIO e suas instituições parceiras. O serviço destina-se a ser usado por utilizadores autenticados, oferecendo-lhes um serviço com interface intuitiva que contém as ferramentas necessárias para criar, editar e partilhar coleções com o público, trazendo ao de cima o melhor que o património cultural português tem para oferecer, em coleções temáticas que qualquer um pode explorar, desfrutar e compartilhar com outras pessoas

Developing a service endpoint to integrate semantic collection data from botanical databases and other information systems

The digitization of botanical collections has increasingly brought biodiversity research activities online. In order to make these data usable in the most efficient way, various obstacles have to be overcome. One such obstacle is a lack of ability to integrate information from other sources. While agreed upon, machine-understandable data standards such as ABCD have resulted in concepts that can already be described semantically, yet they are often transmitted as free-text information. The utilization of identifers for collectors has created opportunities for the integration of data from external information systems. However, since the identifers used are not standardized and vary from institution to institution, this work aims to develop a web service demonstrating that this problem can be overcome by applying appropriate Linked Data methods on centralized knowledge bases such as Wikidata. After eliciting requirements from participating CETAF institutions, an API was designed and implemented on this basis that can integrate biographic, bibliographic, and collection data into a single semantic file format by leveraging multiple endpoints. Thus, the work shows that diverse identifers used in collection databases do not have to be a problem. Moreover, missing IDs for important information sources such as Wikidata can be found and used. Heterogeneous data from different sources can be merged using previously defined mappings, although such data may not be available in semantic formats. Further sources of information could thus be added in the future. Furthermore, a future focus on annotated geographic identifers is also conceivable to additionally integrate semantic data on collection object found locations

LODE: Linking Digital Humanities Content to the Web of Data

Numerous digital humanities projects maintain their data collections in the form of text, images, and metadata. While data may be stored in many formats, from plain text to XML to relational databases, the use of the resource description framework (RDF) as a standardized representation has gained considerable traction during the last five years. Almost every digital humanities meeting has at least one session concerned with the topic of digital humanities, RDF, and linked data. While most existing work in linked data has focused on improving algorithms for entity matching, the aim of the LinkedHumanities project is to build digital humanities tools that work "out of the box," enabling their use by humanities scholars, computer scientists, librarians, and information scientists alike. With this paper, we report on the Linked Open Data Enhancer (LODE) framework developed as part of the LinkedHumanities project. With LODE we support non-technical users to enrich a local RDF repository with high-quality data from the Linked Open Data cloud. LODE links and enhances the local RDF repository without compromising the quality of the data. In particular, LODE supports the user in the enhancement and linking process by providing intuitive user-interfaces and by suggesting high-quality linking candidates using tailored matching algorithms. We hope that the LODE framework will be useful to digital humanities scholars complementing other digital humanities tools

Accurator: Nichesourcing for Cultural Heritage

With more and more cultural heritage data being published online, their usefulness in this open context depends on the quality and diversity of descriptive metadata for collection objects. In many cases, existing metadata is not adequate for a variety of retrieval and research tasks and more specific annotations are necessary. However, eliciting such annotations is a challenge since it often requires domain-specific knowledge. Where crowdsourcing can be successfully used for eliciting simple annotations, identifying people with the required expertise might prove troublesome for tasks requiring more complex or domain-specific knowledge. Nichesourcing addresses this problem, by tapping into the expert knowledge available in niche communities. This paper presents Accurator, a methodology for conducting nichesourcing campaigns for cultural heritage institutions, by addressing communities, organizing events and tailoring a web-based annotation tool to a domain of choice. The contribution of this paper is threefold: 1) a nichesourcing methodology, 2) an annotation tool for experts and 3) validation of the methodology and tool in three case studies. The three domains of the case studies are birds on art, bible prints and fashion images. We compare the quality and quantity of obtained annotations in the three case studies, showing that the nichesourcing methodology in combination with the image annotation tool can be used to collect high quality annotations in a variety of domains and annotation tasks. A user evaluation indicates the tool is suited and usable for domain specific annotation tasks

ARL White Paper on Wikidata: Opportunities and Recommendations

This white paper highlights opportunities for research library involvement in Wikidata, particularly in community-based collections, community-owned infrastructure, and collective collections