The National Library of Estonia has been part of several initiatives and projects shaping the current and future landscape of libraries in Europe. More often than not these initiatives have been focused on building, developing or expanding digital library services. By providing overview of projects like TEL, TEL-ME-MOR, EDLproject, EDLnet and TELplus the history of The European Library and of the European Digital Library is outlined, showing a national library’s way from national to international provider of services and the role of the European Commission in supporting this kind of development.

In this talk, we begin from a discussion of current work in the metadata schema registry sector and its relation to 1) parallel work in vocabulary management and 2) informal approaches to vocabulary development and use, such as tagging. By examining the relation between different forms of semantic annotation we gain an overview of the overall metadata vocabulary landscape.

Document surrogates, metadata records contributed by expert indexers, are used to assist in document search, browse and indexing. This is a relatively expensive approach, and is sometimes seen as an uneconomic option. In part for reasons of cost, various other strategies are commonly used in the modern repository landscape, such as the use of metadata generated by humans who are not trained in the area of indexing, including structured metadata like Dublin Core or Learning Object Metadata. Another involves indexing via manipulation of datasets representing far less structured annotations, such as social tagging. Metadata represent a spectrum ranging from formal and explicit to informal, implicit and interpretive.

Metadata schema registries are designed to provide a central point enabling mediation between the forces that shape metadata design and use, an intensely collaborative process between system designers, contributors and consumers. This is a process with no endpoint; the vocabulary in use yesterday adapts to the uses required of it tomorrow. The schema registry is a midpoint bridging the past and the future of object description. Issues in vocabulary development, tracking, and definition management are relevant to schema creation and management, as are recommendations that set out good practice in vocabulary creation and development.

In 1997 the library community, represented by IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations and Libraries, produced a conceptual model for bibliographic information, FRBR ("Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records"). One year later, version 1 of CIDOC CRM, the conceptual model for museum information, was released by the ICOM/CIDOC (International Council of Museums, International Committee for Documentation). This presentation is about the current efforts toward a "translation" of FRBR into the formalism of CIDOC CRM and the eventual merging of these two conceptual models for cultural heritage information. What benefits are expected from having a common model for library and museum information?  What methodology is being employed? What will be the main features of the resulting model? What is the ultimate purpose of conceptualisation efforts in the field of cultural heritage information?

 This paper presents the vision and results of creating the basis for a national semantic web content infrastructure in Finland in 2003--2007. The main elements of the infrastructure are shared and open metadata schemas, core ontologies, and public ontology services. Several practical applications testing and demonstrating the usefulness of the infrastructure are overviewed in the fields of eCulture, eHealth, eGovernment, eLearning, and eCommerce.

The talk is based on the paper below:

Eero Hyvönen, Kim Viljanen, Eetu Mäkelä, Tomi Kauppinen, Tuukka Ruotsalo, Onni Valkeapää, Katri Seppälä, Osma Suominen, Olli Alm, Robin Lindroos, Teppo Känsälä, Riikka Henriksson, Matias Frosterus, Jouni Tuominen, Reetta Sinkkilä and Jussi Kurki: Elements of a National Semantic Web Infrastructure - Case Study Finland on the Semantic Web (Invited paper). Proceedings of the First International Semantic Computing Conference (IEEE ICSC 2007), Irvine, California, September, 2007. IEEE Press, forth-coming.
http://www.seco.tkk.fi/publications/2007/hyvonen-et-al-elements-2007.pdf

 This presentation describes the semantic portal MuseumFinland for publishing heterogeneous museum collections on the Semantic Web. A production pipeline is described, using which individual museums can make the contents of their databases syntactically and semantically interoperable. After this, the collections can be imported to the MuseumFinland portal, which provides intelligent semantics-based search and browsing functionality to the consolidated collections. This end-user virtual museum experience is also covered in the presentation. MUSEUMFINLAND got the Semantic Web Challence Award (second prize) in 2004.

 The presentation concerns the idea of publishing heterogenous cultural content on the Semantic Web. By heterogenous content we mean metadata describing potentially any kind of cultural objects, including artifacts, photos, paintings, videos, folklore, cultural sites, cultural process descriptions, biographies, history etc. The metadata schemas used are different and the metadata may be represented at different levels of semantic granularity. The presentation describes work that is an extension to previous research on semantic cultural portals, such as MuseumFinland, that are usually based on a shared homogeneous schema, such as Dublin Core, and focus on content of similar kinds, such as artifacts. Our experiences suggest that a semantically richer event-based knowledge representation scheme than traditional metadata schemas is needed in order to support reasoning when performing semantic search and browsing. The new key idea is to transform different forms of metadata into event-based knowledge about the entities and events that take place in the world or in fiction. This approach facilitates semantic interoperability and reasoning about the world and stories at the same time, which enables implementation of intelligent services for the end-user. These ideas are addressed by presenting the prototype implementations of a new kind of cross-domain semantic cultural portal CULTURESAMPO -- Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web.

This talk will start out from HUMlab, a studio environment at Umeå University for the humanities and information technology, and some general questions about innovation and structure in relation to digital humanities and cultural heritage. One important point concerns the interaction between areas such as new media, knowledge representation and digital humanities. Furthermore, issues of innovation, dynamicity and sustainability will be discussed in relation to a few HUMlab-based projects – including the sixth framework project Query and context based visualization of time-spatial cultural dynamics (QVIZ) and a new project that aims to make cultural heritage about social virtual worlds intelligently accessible (Virtual Worlds Timeline).
 
Links:
 
HUMlab Blog: http://blog.humlab.umu.se
QVIZ Project: http://qviz.eu/
Virtual Worlds Timeline: http://www.vwtimeline.org/

The talk will be about applying the idea of open linked data to the traditionally closed and isolated worlds of cultural heritage collections.  I will discuss the lessons learned in the first three
years of the Dutch MultimediaN E-culture Project, a project that develops new Semantic Web technology to realize new search services and smarter Web interfaces.  The main principle underlying the project is that by adding meaningful relationships across collections, all individual data collections grow
in value. In the same way explicit hyperlinks add value to all Web documents being linked to and from, explicit relationships on the Semantic Web add value by providing context to previously isolated data.

The main ingredient of the talk will, however, be a live demonstration of the project's prototype that has won the first prize at the Semantic Web Challenge at the 5th International Semantic Web Conference held in Athens, Georgia, USA. The same system was also successfully demonstrated at the Museums and the Web 2007 conference in San Francisco, USA.

 Building a Gateway to Early European Cultural Heritage Resources in Australia
Dr. Toby Burrows, Digital Services Director, ARC Network for Early European Research, University of Western Australia

In the perfectly interoperable future, better metadata might connect all our content more closely, more intelligently, with more meaning. And it's this opportunity for more thoughtful connection that lead to the 2006/2007 Semantic Web Think Tank (SWTT) project, an experimental UK partnership between the 24 Hour Museum, the Museums Computer Group, MDA, UK national museums and many collaborators in the academic world, and the software sector.

The £15,000 project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, pulled together small groups of experts to talk in directed sessions, which would then be recorded and published as short papers or notes on a blog and report.

The six national meetings that followed were planned in advance to deal with likely development themes pre-agreed by a core organising group. SWTT was funded to be a think tank, and initially intended not to make product, but to look for directions, and to perhaps make some simple recommendations for those who have responsibility for the development of cultural digital infrastructure in the UK.

The big take home from the SWTT project has not, in the end, been a demonstrator, or a widget of some kind. It's the emergence of a suggested roadmap for the future development of a joined up digital cultural sector, which will be revealed in more detail in a report published late 2007/spring 2008. This conference session will reveal some of the findings from the workshop meetings.

http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/

Nowadays, the amount of available digital information is growing rapidly, and it is distributed among many different sources, including personal desktop computers. We need to improve the way we manage and search for information in order to allow for faster, more accurate and efficient mechanisms. In particular, we need to address search and ranking (on both textual and
multimedia content) in a personalized way (each user is different) while enforcing access control and preserving user privacy. This talk will give an overview of the challenges being currently addressed within four of the European projects L3S Research Center is involved (NEPOMUK, PHAROS, REWERSE and TENCompetence) as well as some of the advances they already performed.