and the human behaviour it induces at the micro, meso and macro level

Schreiber, A.Th.

Guus Schreiber

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Web Science: The Digital-Heritage Case

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Web science: The digital-heritage case

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VU Research PortalWeb science: The digital-heritage caseSchreiber, A.Th.published inLecture Notes in Computer Science2010DOI (link to publisher)10.1007/978-3-642-11266-9_9Link to publication in VU Research Portalcitation for published version (APA)Schreiber, A. T. (2010). Web science: The digital-heritage case. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5901, 108-111. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11266-9_9General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright ownersand it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.            • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.            • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain            • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ?Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediatelyand investigate your claim.E-mail address:vuresearchportal.ub@vu.nlDownload date: 23. May. 2021Web Science: the Digital-Heritage CaseGuus SchreiberVU University Amsterdam, Computer ScienceDe Boelelaan 1085, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The NetherlandsE-mail: schreiber@cs.vu.nl; WWW: http://wiki.cs.vu.nl/web-mediaAbstract. Web Science studies the interpay between web technologyand the human behaviour it induces at the micro, meso and macro level.In this extended abstract we examine Web Science research issues bytaking a closer look at the area of digital heritage. We discuss engineering,communication and socio-economic aspects.1 What is Web Science?Over the past 15 years the Web has had an increasing impact on the life of people.Web technology has changed the way people operate and communicate, both intheir personal and working lives. In many ways the Web is a new phenomenon,for which the principles of the physical world do not always hold. Web scienceis a new scientific discipline that studies this phenomenon, in particular theinterplay between Web technology and the effect it has on human behavior atthe personal organizational and societal level.Good introductions into Web Science can be found in the articles of Berners-Lee et al. [1] and Shneiderman [2]. The program and proceeddings of the 1stWeb Science Conference in Athens1 give a good impression of the field. In thisextended abstract we illustrate research issues in Web Science by looking at oneparticular area, namely the digital heritage domain. Digital heritage comprisesaccess to and interaction with large-scale virtual cultural heritage collections. Welook at this domain from the experiences gained in a series of digital heritageprojects, such as the ongoing work on the Europeana culture portal Europeana2.We limit the discussion here to engineering, communication and socio-econmicaspects of digital heritage.2 Engineering of digital-heritage collectionsCultural heritage is an extremely knowledge-rich domain. Institutions in this fieldhave been gathering knowledge for decades or even centuries. This knowledgeis gathered in the form of a multitude of vocabularies, thesauri, classificationschemes and other knowledge organization systems, which are used to describe1 http://www.websci09.org/2 http://www.europeana.euheritage objects, such as paintings, books and archival documents. These knowl-edge organization systems display a enormous richness, but are seldomly de-scribed in the formal way favored by computer scientists. The biggest challengein digital-heritage ventures, such as Europeana, lies in interoperability. The de-scription of heritage objects inherently shows a large variety of perspectives,caused by differences in type of object, time, place, culture and language.When constructing a web portal for cultural heritage, such as Europeana orE-Culture[3], we are faced with a number of research questions. Firstly, we haveto provide mechanisms for explicating heritage knowledge in a machine-readableweb format. SKOS3 is a recently released web standard for achieving this. Thedesign of SKOS reflects some important principles, in particular the principle of“minimal ontological commitment”: schema’s for publishing knowledge on theWeb need to be restricted to the minimum level of required constructs and se-mantic constraints for these to be usable across the field. For computer scientistswith their formal background this is often counterintuitive. Secondly, to enablecollection interoperability we need to provide techniques for partial alignmentsbetween knowledge organization systems. In other words: unification is infeasi-ble in diverse domains such as cultural heritage; the best we can do is uncoverthe agreement and overlap that does exist. For this reason vocabulary-alignmenttechniques have become an active area in web research. Thirdly, due to the factthat cultural-heritage descriptions often partially consist of textual descriptionswe also require a range of knowledge-extraction techniques, such as from natural-language processing and machine learning. Finally, we have to deal with largeamounts of data, typically billions of statements (“the web of data”). This re-quires scalable search techniques. Given such amounts of data, the traditionalnotions of correctness and completeness make no sense. Therefore, alternativeapproaches to reasoning in a web of data are an active area of research4.Engineering web data in other domains, such as health care and biology leadsto similar research issues. A pervasive common issue is also the notion of webidentity. What should be the URI for Pablo Picasso or for the European union?Despite the many research efforts in this area, this is still an open researchproblem. It is likely that solutions will require some form of societal consensus.3 Communication in digital heritageAn often-heard opinion in the cultural-heritage field is that the digital experiencecan never replace the “real thing”. In this view digital access is is a surrogate andshould ideally be a teaser for the web visitor to come to the museum. This is a lop-sided view: the virtual world provides us with alternative and complementaryforms of interaction with cultural heritage. An example is the generation ofpersonalized museum tours [4]. Such tours can be first generated for a digitalexperience and then be downloaded on a mobile device for a physical tour in amuseum. The physical tour has limitation ins time and space; the virtual tour3 http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/4 http://www.larkc.euhas limitations in freedom of experience. It should also be noted that digitaltechniques help in accessing objects that would otherwise be inaccessible forconservation reasons (e.g. old manuscripts). Thus the virtual and physical visitboth have their own pros and cons.Social tagging is receiving considerable attention in the museum world (seefor example the Steve Museum5). Tagging is a way to involve web visitors moreactively in the collection. Also, given the large amounts of poorly-described ob-jects the heritage institutions are keen on using web visitors for creating objectmetadata. This raises two issues. Firstly, institutions have to come up with incen-tive schemes for web visitors to help annotating the objects. Secondly, qualityis seen as a key characteristic of curated metdata and is not yet clear whichstrategies should be followed in quality control of non-curated metadata. This isnow an active area of research.Central in web communication is the issue of user identity and user profiling.Current practice is that user identity is mostly handled at the level of individualweb sites or applications. For web visitors this means they have to recreate theiridentity and their profile in many different places. The control of users over theirown profile is limited, as it is usually stored in application-specific cookies. Thereare several proposals to “put the web visitor back in the driver seat”, such asFOAF6, OpenID7 and OpenSocial8. We expect these mechanisms to change thescenery significantly over the next few years.4 Social and economic issues in digital heritageAlthough heritage institutions, at least in Europe, are almost all public institu-tions funded with public money, this does not mean that open access to cultural-heritage data should be taken for granted. Projects like Europeana face socialbarriers in it strive for open access. This is understandable: the heritage insti-tutions have built up their knowledge and data over a long time with an eye onquality control, and are anxious to make this available with the risk of it beingused or interpreted in the wrong way. For open access to be become the norminstead of the exception leaders in the field have to set the example. In the li-brary world Library of Congress has done this by making their Subject Headingspublicly available in a SKOS format9. Major European national libraries, museaand archives are now doing the same within Europeana.Access to object data, such as images of paintings, still gives rise to rightsand authority issues. New license schemes are required. Creative Commons10 isfrequently mentioned in this context, but is not really tailored to the type ofheritage field. Similar schemes, but targeted specifically at data collections, have5 http://www.steve.museum/6 http://www.foaf-project.org/7 http://openid.net/8 http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/9 http://id.loc.gov/authorities/10 http://creativecommons.org/been proposed. Open Data Commons11 appears to be a promising candidate fordeployment in the area.The business models for digital heritage depend to some extent on the rightsissue. A typical web business model would assume that all primary access tothe collections is free, including low and medium-resolution images. Secondaryservices can be profit-based, such as access to high-resolution images, use ofobjects within a virtual museum shop (e.g., posters, clothing) and integrationwith tourist services (e.g. combining heritage access with city walks).5 OutlookThe web should be viewed as a new ecosystem with an ecology that is in variousways different from the systems we know. It deserves scientific attention froma multidisciplinary angle. Universities are already setting up their first WebScience curricula. The researcher in Web Science works in a new playing field,with new types of interplay between technology and society.Acknowledgements The ideas in this paper are based on joint work and discus-sions with many people, in particular colleagues of the VU Semantic Web group,collaborators in research projects, and co-members of the research council of theWeb Science Research Initiative12.References1. Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J.A., O’Hara, K., Shadbolt, N., Weitzner, D.J.:A framework for web science. Foundations and Trends in Web Science 1(1) (2006)1–1302. Shneiderman, B.: Web science: a provocative invitation to computer science. Com-mun. ACM 50(6) (2007) 25–273. Schreiber, G., Amin, A., Aroyo, L., van Assem, M., de Boer, V., Hardman, L.,Hildebrand, M., Omelayenko, B., van Ossenbruggen, J., Tordai, A., Wielemaker, J.,Wielinga, B.: Semantic annotation and search of cultural-heritage collections: TheMultimediaN E-Culture demonstrator. J. Web Semantics 6(4) (2008) 243–2494. Wang, Y., Stash, N., Aroyo, L., Gorgels, P., Rutledge, L., Schreiber, G.: Recom-mendations based on semantically enriched museum collections. J. Web Semantics6(4) (2008) 283–29011 http://www.opendatacommons.org/12 http://webscience.org/

English

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Web Science: the Digital-Heritage Case
Guus Schreiber
VU University Amsterdam, Computer Science
De Boelelaan 1085, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
E-mail: schreiber@cs.vu.nl; WWW: http://wiki.cs.vu.nl/web-media
Abstract. Web Science studies the interpay between web technology
and the human behaviour it induces at the micro, meso and macro level.
In this extended abstract we examine Web Science research issues by
taking a closer look at the area of digital heritage. We discuss engineering,
communication and socio-economic aspects.
1 What is Web Science?
Over the past 15 years the Web has had an increasing impact on the life of people.
Web technology has changed the way people operate and communicate, both in
their personal and working lives. In many ways the Web is a new phenomenon,
for which the principles of the physical world do not always hold. Web science
is a new scientific discipline that studies this phenomenon, in particular the
interplay between Web technology and the effect it has on human behavior at
the personal organizational and societal level.
Good introductions into Web Science can be found in the articles of Berners-
Lee et al. [1] and Shneiderman [2]. The program and proceeddings of the 1st
Web Science Conference in Athens1 give a good impression of the field. In this
extended abstract we illustrate research issues in Web Science by looking at one
particular area, namely the digital heritage domain. Digital heritage comprises
access to and interaction with large-scale virtual cultural heritage collections. We
look at this domain from the experiences gained in a series of digital heritage
projects, such as the ongoing work on the Europeana culture portal Europeana2.
We limit the discussion here to engineering, communication and socio-econmic
aspects of digital heritage.
2 Engineering of digital-heritage collections
Cultural heritage is an extremely knowledge-rich domain. Institutions in this field
have been gathering knowledge for decades or even centuries. This knowledge
is gathered in the form of a multitude of vocabularies, thesauri, classification
schemes and other knowledge organization systems, which are used to describe
1 http://www.websci09.org/
2 http://www.europeana.eu
heritage objects, such as paintings, books and archival documents. These knowl-
edge organization systems display a enormous richness, but are seldomly de-
scribed in the formal way favored by computer scientists. The biggest challenge
in digital-heritage ventures, such as Europeana, lies in interoperability. The de-
scription of heritage objects inherently shows a large variety of perspectives,
caused by differences in type of object, time, place, culture and language.
When constructing a web portal for cultural heritage, such as Europeana or
E-Culture[3], we are faced with a number of research questions. Firstly, we have
to provide mechanisms for explicating heritage knowledge in a machine-readable
web format. SKOS3 is a recently released web standard for achieving this. The
design of SKOS reflects some important principles, in particular the principle of
“minimal ontological commitment”: schema’s for publishing knowledge on the
Web need to be restricted to the minimum level of required constructs and se-
mantic constraints for these to be usable across the field. For computer scientists
with their formal background this is often counterintuitive. Secondly, to enable
collection interoperability we need to provide techniques for partial alignments
between knowledge organization systems. In other words: unification is infeasi-
ble in diverse domains such as cultural heritage; the best we can do is uncover
the agreement and overlap that does exist. For this reason vocabulary-alignment
techniques have become an active area in web research. Thirdly, due to the fact
that cultural-heritage descriptions often partially consist of textual descriptions
we also require a range of knowledge-extraction techniques, such as from natural-
language processing and machine learning. Finally, we have to deal with large
amounts of data, typically billions of statements (“the web of data”). This re-
quires scalable search techniques. Given such amounts of data, the traditional
notions of correctness and completeness make no sense. Therefore, alternative
approaches to reasoning in a web of data are an active area of research4.
Engineering web data in other domains, such as health care and biology leads
to similar research issues. A pervasive common issue is also the notion of web
identity. What should be the URI for Pablo Picasso or for the European union?
Despite the many research efforts in this area, this is still an open research
problem. It is likely that solutions will require some form of societal consensus.
3 Communication in digital heritage
An often-heard opinion in the cultural-heritage field is that the digital experience
can never replace the “real thing”. In this view digital access is is a surrogate and
should ideally be a teaser for the web visitor to come to the museum. This is a lop-
sided view: the virtual world provides us with alternative and complementary
forms of interaction with cultural heritage. An example is the generation of
personalized museum tours [4]. Such tours can be first generated for a digital
experience and then be downloaded on a mobile device for a physical tour in a
museum. The physical tour has limitation ins time and space; the virtual tour
3 http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/
4 http://www.larkc.eu
has limitations in freedom of experience. It should also be noted that digital
techniques help in accessing objects that would otherwise be inaccessible for
conservation reasons (e.g. old manuscripts). Thus the virtual and physical visit
both have their own pros and cons.
Social tagging is receiving considerable attention in the museum world (see
for example the Steve Museum5). Tagging is a way to involve web visitors more
actively in the collection. Also, given the large amounts of poorly-described ob-
jects the heritage institutions are keen on using web visitors for creating object
metadata. This raises two issues. Firstly, institutions have to come up with incen-
tive schemes for web visitors to help annotating the objects. Secondly, quality
is seen as a key characteristic of curated metdata and is not yet clear which
strategies should be followed in quality control of non-curated metadata. This is
now an active area of research.
Central in web communication is the issue of user identity and user profiling.
Current practice is that user identity is mostly handled at the level of individual
web sites or applications. For web visitors this means they have to recreate their
identity and their profile in many different places. The control of users over their
own profile is limited, as it is usually stored in application-specific cookies. There
are several proposals to “put the web visitor back in the driver seat”, such as
FOAF6, OpenID7 and OpenSocial8. We expect these mechanisms to change the
scenery significantly over the next few years.
4 Social and economic issues in digital heritage
Although heritage institutions, at least in Europe, are almost all public institu-
tions funded with public money, this does not mean that open access to cultural-
heritage data should be taken for granted. Projects like Europeana face social
barriers in it strive for open access. This is understandable: the heritage insti-
tutions have built up their knowledge and data over a long time with an eye on
quality control, and are anxious to make this available with the risk of it being
used or interpreted in the wrong way. For open access to be become the norm
instead of the exception leaders in the field have to set the example. In the li-
brary world Library of Congress has done this by making their Subject Headings
publicly available in a SKOS format9. Major European national libraries, musea
and archives are now doing the same within Europeana.
Access to object data, such as images of paintings, still gives rise to rights
and authority issues. New license schemes are required. Creative Commons10 is
frequently mentioned in this context, but is not really tailored to the type of
heritage field. Similar schemes, but targeted specifically at data collections, have
5 http://www.steve.museum/
6 http://www.foaf-project.org/
7 http://openid.net/
8 http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
9 http://id.loc.gov/authorities/
10 http://creativecommons.org/
been proposed. Open Data Commons11 appears to be a promising candidate for
deployment in the area.
The business models for digital heritage depend to some extent on the rights
issue. A typical web business model would assume that all primary access to
the collections is free, including low and medium-resolution images. Secondary
services can be profit-based, such as access to high-resolution images, use of
objects within a virtual museum shop (e.g., posters, clothing) and integration
with tourist services (e.g. combining heritage access with city walks).
5 Outlook
The web should be viewed as a new ecosystem with an ecology that is in various
ways different from the systems we know. It deserves scientific attention from
a multidisciplinary angle. Universities are already setting up their first Web
Science curricula. The researcher in Web Science works in a new playing field,
with new types of interplay between technology and society.
Acknowledgements The ideas in this paper are based on joint work and discus-
sions with many people, in particular colleagues of the VU Semantic Web group,
collaborators in research projects, and co-members of the research council of the
Web Science Research Initiative12.
References
1. Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J.A., O’Hara, K., Shadbolt, N., Weitzner, D.J.:
A framework for web science. Foundations and Trends in Web Science 1(1) (2006)
1–130
2. Shneiderman, B.: Web science: a provocative invitation to computer science. Com-
mun. ACM 50(6) (2007) 25–27
3. Schreiber, G., Amin, A., Aroyo, L., van Assem, M., de Boer, V., Hardman, L.,
Hildebrand, M., Omelayenko, B., van Ossenbruggen, J., Tordai, A., Wielemaker, J.,
Wielinga, B.: Semantic annotation and search of cultural-heritage collections: The
MultimediaN E-Culture demonstrator. J. Web Semantics 6(4) (2008) 243–249
4. Wang, Y., Stash, N., Aroyo, L., Gorgels, P., Rutledge, L., Schreiber, G.: Recom-
mendations based on semantically enriched museum collections. J. Web Semantics
6(4) (2008) 283–290
11 http://www.opendatacommons.org/
12 http://webscience.org/


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