Expanding scientific knowledge frontiers: open repositories in developing countries supported by NRENs

The current scenario of Internet operation has brought many challenges and opportunities to science as result of the evolution of technologies and network infrastructures, key enablers to information access at distinct levels. Regarding research and teaching, scientific Open Access (OA) repositories play a key role in the production, dissemination and sharing of knowledge. OA repositories improve the visibility, accessibility and availability of results from teaching and research activities, contributing to the knowledge society through the provision of scientific publications without restrictions.Taking worldwide OA initiatives and the Portuguese experience as case study, this paper analyzes technical challenges and strategies for building open repositories supported by National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in the African context. Considering Mozambique as the main target of this paper, the study of: (i) existing national and international initiatives; (ii) MoRENet -the Mozambique Research and Education Network; and (iii) SABER repository, will support the proposal of a set of directives and policies for the development and sustainability of a common OA platform for scientific and academic national production.We believe that this open repository will bring an undeniable added value for Mozambique knowledge growth, fostering the country development at both scientific and social levels.The authors would like to thank UM documentation services and RCAAP by sharing expertise in OA field. This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia in the scope of the project: PEst-OE/EEI/UI0319/2014.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

CrossCult D2.4 Refined digital cultural resource data & data structure

This report presents the CrossCult digital datasets of the four project pilots.It contains a description of the methods and data structures used to semantically model and ingest the digital resources of the pilots into the CrossCult Knowledge Base following the semantics of the CrossCult Upper-level ontology, a set of examples of semantic enrichment, information retrieval and association discovery among the pilots’ resources and other related information in the CrossCult Knowledge Base,and a brief description of how the pilots’ digital resources can be viewed and access through three different front-end application

LIS education and cultural heritage information management

It has been more than two decades that LIS Education has been regarding information organizations (libraries, archives and museums) as an integrated field sharing a common basis of acquiring, handling and disseminating information independently of its source or substrate. In this respect LIS curriculum has treated resources at the basis of their descriptive, structural and administrative metadata; their semantic value; and the employment of technology as the means for creating a common platform for its organization, accessing and dissemination purposes. Within this framework, LIS curriculum has expanded in order to meet the informational needs of cultural heritage institutions, such as museums and cultural centers. Furthermore, their requisites to create the fundamentals for their digital information management and digital presence in the web and their obligations to supply information and communicate with each other became also part of the curriculum. The latter introduced almost simultaneously the need to operate in common environment with archives and libraries that not only hold a significant amount of related information but also have common operational attributes. The latter has brought forward issues of interoperability, communication between metadata standards, the use of controlled vocabularies and semantic representation techniques. All of the above, have established the notion in LIS Education that libraries, archives and museums are a global network of information organizations. At the same time, a series of cultural heritage projects, funded through the Horizon2020 call were focusing on employing new technologies for staging cultural heritage content. The need for metadata and semantics had acquired the expertise of information professionals. In this paper the case of the curriculum reform of the Department of Archives, Library and information Studies of the University of West Attica is presented and the specific interrelationship of the Horizon2020 Project “CrossCult” in which the aforementioned Department participated, is viewed as a parameter for shaping a cluster of courses within its curriculum. Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available over 7 years (2014 to 2020) - https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/what-horizon-2020 CrossCult: "Empowering reuse of digital cultural heritage in context-aware crosscuts of European history”, website: https://www.crosscult.eu/en/about/background/ (Horizon 2020)

Semantic Representation and Enrichment of Cultural Heritage Information for Fostering Reinterpretation and Reflection on the European History

The potential of the digital world for generating new ways of engaging with cultural heritage information has been documented in the literature over the past 20 years. The modern advances of digital technologies provide a wider access to information, and enable new ways of interacting with and understanding of cultural heritage information, facilitating its presentation, access and reinterpretation [4]. Ensuring that the growth of available cultural heritage information is mutually interoperable so that it can be searched, linked and presented in a harmonised way across the boundaries of datasets and data silos remains though a fundamental problem [3]. This paper describes a working example of connecting and mapping distant cultural heritage resources available across cultural heritage institutions and venues though an open technological platform