TeLearn - DigiCult

FP7 projects in cultural heritage, digital libraries and preservation

The projects presented on this page result from the first calls for proposals under the ICT programme in FP7:

• ICT Call 1, December 2006 - May 2007
• ICT Call 3, December 2007 - April 2008
• ICT Call 6, November 2009 - April 2010

New projects

The 15 projects selected through ICT Call 6 have started between December 2010 and April 2011. They join the efforts and expertise of 194 participating organisations and are supported with an EU contribution of € 69 mio.

APARSEN - Alliance Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe Network

This Network of Excellence gathers a very diverse set of practitioner organisations and researchers in order to bring coherence, cohesion and continuity to research into barriers to the long-term accessibility and usability of digital information and data, and to build a long-lived Virtual Centre of Digital Preservation Excellence. Joint research activities will cover technical methods for preservation, access and re-use of data holdings over the whole lifecycle; legal and economic issues including costs and governance as well as digital rights; and outreach within and outside the consortium to help to create a discipline of data curators with appropriate qualifications.
Fact sheet - Project website

ARCOMEM - Archive Communities Memories

The vision of the ARCOMEM project is to leverage the Wisdom of the Crowds present in the social web for the purposes of content appraisal, selection and preservation. This will be the basis for creating and preserving archives that reflect collective memory and social content perception and are thus closer to current and future users. The research will be showcased on two example applications, the first for media-related Web archives and the second for political archives.

Fact sheet - Project website

ARtSENSE - Augumented Reality supported adaptive and personalized experience in a museum based on processing real-time sensor events

ARtSENSE will create a new generation of mobile museum guides based on the novel concept of Adaptive Augmented Reality (A2R), bridging the gap between the digital and physical worlds. It will make use of low weight bidirectional see-through displays that enable transparent overlays of real images with digital information. This cutting-edge technology will include gaze-and gesture-controlled interaction, giving visitors the feeling that physical objects are directly responding to them. In that way artworks will become active artefacts that react on users’ attention and emotions and provide more information about them.
Fact sheet - Project website

AXES - Access to Audiovisual Archives

The goal of AXES is to develop tools that provide various types of users with new engaging ways to interact with audiovisual libraries, helping them discover, browse, navigate, search and enrich archives. Research includes better understanding of user groups and their present and emerging new media behavior; robust and scalable automatic tools for semantic enrichment; and novel, more intuitive and pro-active access schemes for experiencing digital libraries. All final components will be implemented as services in a flexible, layered system.
Fact sheet - Project website

BlogForever

The research team will develop robust digital preservation, management and dissemination facilities for weblogs. These facilities will be able to capture the dynamic and continuously evolving nature of weblogs, their network and social structure, and the exchange of concepts and ideas that they foster. The final output of the project will be a digital archiving solution that any user, user group or institution could use to preserve their weblog(s) and ensure their authenticity, integrity, completeness, usability, and long term accessibility as a valuable cultural, social, and intellectual resource.

Fact sheet - Project website

CHESS - Cultural Heritage Experiences through Socio-personal interactions and Storytelling

CHESS will integrate interdisciplinary research in personalisation and adaptivity, digital storytelling, interaction methodologies, and narrative-oriented mobile and mixed reality technologies, with a sound theoretical basis in museological, cognitive, and learning sciences. The result will be an innovative conceptual and technological framework that will enable both the experiencing of personalised interactive stories for visitors of cultural sites and their authoring by the professional curators. These narrative-driven cultural 'adventures' will adapt continuously to their visitors, extend over space and time, and involve multiple users with different interfaces.
Fact sheet - Project website

CULTURA - Cultivating Understanding and Research through Adaptivity

CULTURA will deliver innovative adaptive services and an interactive user environment which dynamically tailors the investigation, comprehension and enrichment of digital humanities artefacts and collections. This will offer genuine user empowerment and unprecedented levels of engagement with digital cultural heritage collections and communities.
Fact sheet - Project website

DECIPHER - Digital Environment for Cultural Interfaces; Promoting Heritage, Education and Research

Digital heritage and semantic web technologies hold out the promise of nearly unlimited access to cultural knowledge. The problem is that cultural meaning does not reside in individual objects but in the patterns of knowledge and events, belief and thought that link them to each other and to the observer. DECIPHER will, through combining event-based metadata with casual reasoning models, enable the presentation of digital heritage objects as part of a coherent narrative that is directly related to the user’s interests. Users will be able to interactively assemble, visualise and explore not only collections of objects, but also the knowledge structures that connect them and give them meaning.
Fact sheet - Project website

DigiBIC

The DigiBIC project is partnering researchers, business networks, cultural heritage centres, and SMEs in the creative industry sector with the goal to ensure the optimal exploitation of EU research investment in cultural content and digital preservation.

Fact sheet - Project website

ENSURE - Enabling kNowledge Sustainability Usability and Recovery for Economic value

The focus of this project is on ensuring long term usability for the spiralling amounts of data produced or controlled by organisations with commercial interests. Drawing on motivation from uses cases in aerospace, health care, finance and clinical trials, ENSURE will address issues such as: 1) safely leveraging scalable pay-as-you-go infrastructure such as clouds; 2) having businesses understand the economic implications of preservation; 3) conforming to regulatory, contractual and legal requirements as part of a whole workflow; 4) managing long term integrity and authenticity significant intellectual property or highly personal data; and 5) using off-the-shelf IT technologies for preservation to support different types of digital resources.

Fact sheet - Project website

PATHS - Personalised Access To cultural Heritage Spaces

The primary research goals of PATHS are to provide innovative user-driven personalised access to cultural heritage collections and to support user’s knowledge discovery and exploration. The project will create a system that acts as an interactive personalised tour guide through existing digital library collections by extending the state of the art in user-driven information access and by applying language technologies to analyse and enrich online content, with links to related items and background information. The project will make use of content from the Europeana.
Fact sheet - Project website

SCAPE - Scalable Preservation Environments

The SCAPE project will enhance the state of the art of digital preservation in three ways: by developing an infrastructure and tools for scalable preservation actions; by providing a framework for automated, quality-assured preservation workflows and by integrating these components with a policy-based preservation planning and watch system.
Fact sheet - Project website

TIMBUS - Digital Preservation for Timeless Business Processes and Services

TIMBUS will endeavour to enlarge the understanding of digital preservation in order to include the set of activities, processes and tools that ensure continued access to services and software necessary to (re-)produce the execution context of data - i.e. the context within which information can be accessed, properly rendered, validated and transformed into knowledge. One of the fundamental requirements to achieve this is to preserve the functional and non-functional specifications of services and software, along with their dependencies.

Fact sheet - Project website

V-MusT.net - Virtual Museum Transnational Network

V-MusT.net proposes a framework to overcome the problem that most virtual museums are transient; they are created during a project and disappear afterwards. Besides training activities and a virtual museum laboratory, the network will set up a service platform to integrate virtual museum tools and services, to be used by the whole community. V-MusT.net will bridge technological domains, archival, social and cognitive sciences.

Fact sheet - Project website

Wf4Ever - Advanced Workflow Preservation Technologies for Enhanced Science

The project aims at providing the methods and tools required to ensure the long-term preservation of scientific workflows in order to support the scientific discovery process and the development of new scientific assets. Wf4Ever will also develop strategies for sharing and reusing workflows or workflow fragments and patterns. Finally, methods and tools will be proposed to proactively preserve and inspect workflow integrity and authenticity. Wf4Ever will be evaluated in two workflow-intensive use cases in the domains of astronomy and genomics.

Fact sheet - Project website

Ongoing projects - ICT Call 3

ICT Call 3 has resulted in five projects: two large-scale integrating projects, two small or medium-scale focused research projects and one coordination action, with a total of 55 partner organisations and € 23 500 000 of EU-funding. The projects started between December 2008 and February 2009.

3D-COFORM - Tools and Expertise for 3D Collection Formation

3D-COFORM will focus on digitisation of cultural heritage artefacts and deliver new tools in the areas of 3D-capture, 3D-processing, the semantics of shape, material properties etc., resulting in richer and more realistic representations, better documentation and increased cost effectiveness of the digitisation process.

Fact sheet - Project website

DL.org - Coordination Action on Digital Library Interoperability, Best Practices, and Modelling Foundations

DL.org has created a framework where representatives from digital library initiatives and projects could collaborate, share experiences and expertise. The project worked towards increased awareness and understanding of interoperability of digital libraries systems and towards a consolidated version of the DELOS Digital Library Reference Model.

Fact sheet - Project website

KEEP – Keeping Emulation Environments Portable

KEEP will create portable emulators enabling access to and use of digital objects stored on outdated computer media. The emulators will ensure accurate rendering of both static and dynamic digital objects.

Fact sheet - Project website

PrestoPRIME

PrestoPRIME will address long-term preservation of and access to digital audio-visual content by integrating media archives with European on-line digital libraries. Research will result in a range of tools and services, delivered through a networked Competence Centre.

Fact sheet - Project website

V-City – The Virtual City

V-City will create a system that integrates computer vision, 3D-modelling and virtual reality research for rapid and cost-effective reconstruction, visualisation and exploitation of interactive urban environments. This will lay the ground for large scale geospatial libraries.

Fact sheet - Project website

The first FP7 projects - ICT Call 1

Four small or medium-scale focused research projects, one large-scale integrating project and one coordination action resulted from ICT Call 1. They are being carried out by 64 participating organisations. The total amount of EU-funding is € 27 645 100. Start dates for the work were between November 2007 and March 2008.

IMPACT - Improving Access to Text

The IMPACT project aims to significantly improve access to historical text and to take away the barriers that stand in the way of the mass digitisation of the European cultural heritage.

Fact sheet - Project website

LiWA - Living Web Archives

LiWA has developed and demonstrated web archiving tools able to capture content from a wide variety of sources, to improve archive fidelity and authenticity and to ensure long term interpretability of web content.

Fact sheet - Project website

PAPYRUS - Cultural and Historical Digital Libraries Dynamically Mined from News Archives

PAPYRUS has created a cross-discipline digital library engine that allows for drawing content from one domain and making it available and understandable to the users of another.

Fact sheet - Project website

PROTAGE - Preservation Organizations Using Tools in Agent Environments

The PROTAGE team has built and validated software agents for long-term digital preservation and access that can be integrated in existing and new preservation systems.

Fact sheet - Project website

SHAMAN - Sustaining Heritage Access through Multivalent Archiving

This project will develop and test a next generation digital preservation framework including tools for analysing, ingesting, managing, accessing and reusing information objects and data across libraries and archives.

Fact sheet - Project website

Treble-CLEF - Evaluation, Best Practice and Collaboration for Multilingual Information Access

This Coordination Action has supported the development and consolidation of expertise in the research area multilingual information access. Another core activity was the dissemination of this know-how to the application communities in the digital libraries field.

Fact sheet - Project website