AGORA: Automatic Heritage Metadata Enrichment with Historic Events

Johan Oomen - Head of R&D / PhD CandidateLora Aroyo - Assistant professor

Intelligent Information Systems, Web and Media Department VU University

http://agora.cs.vu.nl

Outline

• Sound and Vision & Academia

• Joint research agenda

• The Agora project (Lora)

• ‘my’ PhD at the VU University

• Discussion (Lora & you & me)

From analogue to Digital

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• More reuse

• New services

• New audiences

• ‘Digging into data’

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Reseach topics

• Content-based retrieval

• Manual metadata generation is costly

• Interoperability

• Searching across collections (Europeana)

• User Generated Content

• Fine grained descriptions

• Recommendation technology

• Accessing the long-tail

Venue

Reseach programmes

My PhD

CATCH Programme

• Fundamental research driven by concrete use-cases

• 14 projects to date

• PhD, Postdoc, Programmer

• hosted @ CH institutions

• http://www.nwo.nl/catch

Practical

• One day a week at the VU

• Research: 16 hrs a week

• Strong link with current projects at Sound and Vision

• WebScience “The Web is the largest human information construct in history. The Web is transforming society. In order to understand what the Web

is, engineer its future and ensure its social benefit we need a new interdisciplinary field

that we call Web Science.”

7/4/11

The Agora Project• 2009-2013

• VU Amsterdam (CS + History Departments), Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

• Funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) within the CATCH research programme

MW2011

Objectives of Agora

• Interoperability between collections

• Using language technology to identify events in texts

• User involvement

• Using events to navigate through collections

Gabriel Metsu(17th century Dutch painer)

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Networked heritage

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‘My’ main research question

• How does the combination of ‘networked access to collections’ and ‘participatory culture’ shape the future of engagement with cultural heritage?

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The Waisda? Experiment

• Basic rule – players score points when their tag exactly matches the tag entered by another player within 10 seconds

• Multiple other scoring mechanisms to create various tag incentives

7/4/11 MW2011

Waisda? Video

7/4/11 MW2011

Version 2 ‘Man tagd hond’

• Links to vocabularies

• New game elements

• Search interface

• Tag gardening

...find out more

• http://agora.cs.vu.nl/publications/

• Johan Oomen ~ @johanoomen

• Lora Aroyo ~ @laroyo

Monks  image  credit:  Wonderlane  (CC-­‐BY-­‐NC)

Challenges

• Humanities background in a CS department

• Time management

•