Project description
Digital Libraries and Digital Preservation
CULTURA's innovative adaptive services and interactive environment will offer genuine user empowerment and unprecedented levels of engagement with digital cultural heritage collections and communities
A key challenge facing curators and providers of digital cultural heritage is to instigate, increase and enhance engagement with digital humanities collections. To achieve this, a fundamental change in the way cultural artefacts are experienced and contributed to by communities is required. The CULTURA project has invested three years of
research and development work in order to enable this change. The resulting innovative adaptive services and interactive environment will offer genuine user empowerment and unprecedented levels of engagement with digital cultural heritage collections and communities.
The CULTURA Virtual Research Environment has pioneered the development of next generation adaptive systems which will provide new forms of multi-dimensional adaptivity:
- personalised information retrieval and presentation which respond to models of user and contextual intent
- community-aware adaptivity which responds to wider community activity, interest, contribution and experience
- content-aware adaptivity which responds to the entities and relationships automatically identified within the artefacts and across collections
- personalised dynamic storylines which are generated across individual as well as entire collections of artefacts
CULTURA advances and integrates the following key technologies:
- Cutting edge natural language processing, which normalises ambiguities in noisy historical texts
- Entity and relationship extraction, which highlights the key individuals, events, dates and other entities and relationships within unstructured text
- Social network analysis of the entities and relationships within the content, and also of the individuals and broader community of users engaging with the content
- Multi-model adaptivity to support dynamic reconciliation of multiple dimensions of personalisation.
The project team has carried out rigorous evaluations and validations of its adaptive services using high impact, contrasting, multicultural digital cultural heritage collections and diverse user communities and individuals.
Through using a variety of cultural heritage material, from historical text to botanical drawings, the researchers have successfully demonstrated that the environment is corpus agnostic, i.e. it can be used for different digital humanities collections with varying degrees of metadata.
A key challenge facing curators and providers of digital cultural heritage across Europe and Worldwide is to instigate, increase and enhance engagement with digital humanities collections. To achieve this, a fundamental change in the way cultural artefacts are experienced and contributed to by communities is required. CULTURA will pioneer the development of next generation adaptive systems which will provide new forms of multi-dimensional adaptivity:\tpersonalised information retrieval and presentation which respond to models of user and contextual intent\tcommunity-aware adaptivity which responds to wider community activity, interest, contribution and experience\tcontent-aware adaptivity which responds to the entities and relationships automatically identified within the artefacts and across collections\tpersonalised dynamic storylines which are generated across individual as well as entire collections of artefactsCULTURA advances and integrates the following key technologies:\tCutting edge natural language processing, which normalises ambiguities in noisy historical texts\tEntity and relationship extraction, which highlights the key individuals, events, dates and other entities and relationships within unstructured text\tSocial network analysis of the entities and relationships within the content, and also of the individuals and broader community of users engaging with the content\tMulti-model adaptivity to support dynamic reconciliation of multiple dimensions of personalisationCULTURA will deliver innovative adaptive services and an interactive user environment which dynamically tailors the investigation, comprehension and enrichment of digital humanities artefacts and collections. Through the provision of such functionality, CULTURA can empower all users to investigate, comprehend and contribute to digital cultural collections.CULTURA will provide rigorous evaluation and validation of its adaptive services using high impact, contrasting, multicultural digital cultural heritage collections and diverse user communities and individuals. The CULTURA use cases, defined in collaboration with real users, will clearly illustrate how the adaptive environment will offer genuine user empowerment and unprecedented levels of engagement with these collections and communities.The CULTURA consortium has a strong emphasis on meeting real end-user needs, maximising societal impact and laying a foundation for successful commercialisation. Thus, the project has a strong scientific foundation, informed by two significant digital cultural resources and associated communities, and supported by experienced and effective project management.
Fields of science
Call for proposal
FP7-ICT-2009-6
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
CP - Collaborative project (generic)Coordinator Contact
Coordinator
D02 CX56 DUBLIN 2
Ireland