ArchiMediaL proposal granted by Volkswagen Stiftung

Volkswagen stiftung letterI received a good news letter from Volkswagen Stiftung who decided to award us a research grant for a 3-year Digital Humanities project named “ArchiMediaL” around architectural history. This project will be a collaboration between  architecture historians from TU Delft,  computer scientists from TU Delft and VU-Web and Media. A number of German scholars will also be involved as domain experts. The project will combine image analysis software with crowdsourcing and semantic linking to create networks of visual resources which will foster understanding of understudied areas in architectural history.
From the proposal:In the mind of the expert or everyday user, the project detaches the digital images from its existence as a single artifact and includes it into a global network of visual sources, without disconnecting it from its provenance. The project that expands the framework of hermeneutic analysis through a quantitative reference system, in which discipline-specific canons and limitations are questions. For the dialogue between the history of architecture and urban form this means a careful balancing of qualitative and quantitative information and of negotiating new methodological approaches for future investigation.

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A Look Back at the 2nd BDE Workshop on Big Data in Health, Demographic Change and Wellbeing

[reblogged from Big-Data-Europe.eu]

On 9 December 2016, the second workshop for the Big Data Europe Health, Demographic Change and Wellbeing societal challenge was held in Brussels. The aim of this workshop was to highlight progress from the BigDataEurope project in building the foundations of a generically applicable big data platform which can be applied across all Horizon 2020 societal challenges. This workshop specifically focused on health, and showcased our first pilot’s application to early bioscience research data.

The workshop in full effect

The workshop had 15 participants, from within the health domain and outside it, including many participants from the European Commission. Together we discussed different perspectives on how we may use appropriate H2020 instruments and work programmes to better integrate the ecosystem of linked data repositories, data management services and virtual collaboration environments to increase the pace of knowledge sharing in health.

The workshop featured presentations from BDE’s Simon Scerri and Aad Versteden on the general goals and progress of the BigDataEurope project and the BDE infrastructure respectively. After lunch, Ronald Siebes (BDE / VU Amsterdam) presented the first pilot in this specific domain. More information on that pilot can be found here. An extensive round-table discussion followed, in which possible options for new applications and connections were considered.

Snapshot of the SC1 pilot interface, as presented by Ronald Siebes

One question raised was whether the generic BDE infrastructure can be used by European SMEs. The fact that the BDE infrastructure is completely Open Source, very easy to install and features intuitive interface components makes re-use relatively simple even for smaller institutions and companies.

A significant part of the discussion focussed on possible new use cases for expanding the scope of the pilot. One suggestion was to look at post-hoc integration of clinical data, which represents a typical problem of data ‘variance’. This would require integrating information from different versions of medical questionnaires, which may be recorded or stored in different ways. Data provenance is also a key concern, as keeping a trail of what has happened to clinical data is crucial to tracking patients’ histories. Once integrated, this data could then be mined to identify biases or data patterns.

Finally, the workshop participants discussed potential connections to other European projects. Here many projects were mentioned including the MIDAS project, the Big-O project on childhood obesity, the PULSE projects and IMI / IMI2 projects including EMIF. We will be seeking collaborations with these projects and will continue to develop new and interesting Big Data use cases in this domain in the coming year.

More images can be found below: BDE Health Workshop SC 1.2

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Web of Voices and W4RA video at the Webscience@10 TV Channel

For its 10th anniversary, the Web Science Trust organized an event Webscience@10. For this event, a Webscience@10 TV channel was launched to showcase different research and education initatives around the world. On behalf of the VU Network Institute and W4RA, we submitted our Web of Voices video as well as a short introduction to the W4RA team.

You can watch the ~10 hours of video content at  http://www.webscience.org/webscience10/tv-channel-webscience10/. You can find us (listed under Netwerk Institute Amsterdam) at 2h31mins:

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