PATHS: Tools for exploring digital cultural heritage spaces

Significant amounts of digital material relating to heritage management and research have become available over recent years with the rise of online publications, digital archives, research infrastructures and aggregators such as Europeana. These large collections present challenges to users in discovering what items are present. Standard search paradigms for item discovery have worked well for those who are highly familiar with the collection being searched but as collections increase in size more powerful exploration systems are required. The PATHS project (www.paths-project.eu), funded by the European Commission's FP7 programme, brings together partners to research and develop a system to provide users with an environment in which they can successfully explore large, unknown collections. The project is applying language technologies to analyse and enrich manually created collection metadata, which is then exploited in the collection discovery environment. This paper will provide a guided tour of the PATH system and the tools developed to enable users to explore collections, collect items and form these into paths. Its goal is invite archaeologists to explore the prototype system and to evaluate the potential of the tools for implementation in research infrastructures and systems designed to present sites, monuments and artefacts to the broad public.</p

Towards Future Oriented Collaborative Policy Development for Rural Areas and People

Rural areas in Europe are at risk due to depopulation, failing generation renewal, and a multitude of influences ranging from market-based, regulatory, to societal and climate changes. As a result, current rural policy is no longer keeping pace with these changes. We propose an advanced rural policy development framework in order to deliver more accurate foresight for rural regions, contributing to new and enhanced policy interventions. The proposed framework combines new quantitative and qualitative epistemological approaches, previously unused unstructured data with traditional research information, grassroot perspective with expert knowledge, current situation analysis with forward looking activities. We argue that by using the proposed methods, policy teams will be able to enhance the effectiveness of their policy making processes, while rural stakeholders will be given the opportunity to become valuable policy influencers and solution co-creators. The ability to quickly experiment and understand the impact of a variety of policy solutions will result in saved time and costs. The framework is part of an ongoing experimental verification and testing in twelve pilot regions across Europe and Israel