DIVE+ receives the Grand Prize at the LODLAM Summit in Venice

We are excited to announce that DIVE+ has been awarded the Grand Prize at the LODLAM Summit, held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini this week. The summit brought together ~100 experts in the vibrant and global community of Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums. It is organised bi-annually since 2011. Earlier editions were held in the US, Canada and Australia, making the 2017 edition the first in Europe.

The Grand Prize (USD$2,000) was awarded by the LODLAM community. It’s recognition of how DIVE+ demonstrates social, cultural and technical impact of linked data. The Open Data Prize (of USD$1,000) was awarded to WarSampo for its groundbreaking approach to publish open data

Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Image credit: Johan Oomen CC-BY

.Five finalists were invited to present their work, selected from a total of 21 submissions after an open call published earlier this year. Johan Oomen, head of research at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision presented DIVE+ on day one of the summit. The slides of his pitch have been published, as well as the demo video that was submitted to the open call. Next to DIVE+ (Netherlands) and WarSampo (Finland) the finalists were Oslo public library (Norway), Fishing in the Data Ocean (Taiwan) and Genealogy Project (China). The diversity of the finalists is a clear indication that the use of linked data technology is gaining momentum. Throughout the summit, delegates have been capturing the outcomes of various breakout sessions. Please look at the overview of session notes and follow @lodlam on Twitter to keep track.

Pictured: Johan Oomen (@johanoomen) pitching DIVE+. Photo: Enno Meijers. 

DIVE+ is an event-centric linked data digital collection browser aimed to provide an integrated and interactive access to multimedia objects from various heterogeneous online collections. It enriches the structured metadata of online collections with linked open data vocabularies with focus on events, people, locations and concepts that are depicted or associated with particular collection objects. DIVE+ is the result of a true interdisciplinary collaboration between computer scientists, humanities scholars, cultural heritage professionals and interaction designers. DIVE+ is integrated in the national CLARIAH (Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) research infrastructure.

Pictured: each day experts shape the agenda for that day, following the OpenSpace format. Image credit: Johan Oomen (cc-by)

DIVE+ is a collaborative effort of the VU University Amsterdam (Victor de Boer, Oana Inel, Lora Aroyo, Chiel van den Akker, Susane Legene), Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Jaap Blom, Liliana Melgar, Johan Oomen), Frontwise (Werner Helmich), University of Groningen (Berber Hagendoorn, Sabrina Sauer) and the Netherlands eScience Centre (Carlos Martinez). It is supported by CLARIAH and NWO.

The LODLAM Challenge was generously sponsored by Synaptica. We would also like to thank the organisers, especially Valentine Charles and Antoine Isaac of Europeana and Ingrid Mason of Aarnet for all of their efforts. LODLAM 2017 has been a truly unforgettable experience for the DIVE+ team.

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Getting down with LOD tools at the 2nd CLARIAH Linked Data workshop

[cross-post from clariah.nl]

On Tuesday 13 June 2017, the second CLARIAH Linked Data workshop took place. After the first workshop in September which was very much an introduction to Linked Data to the CLARIAH community, we wanted to organise a more hands-on workshop where researchers, curators and developers could get their hands dirty.

The main goal of the workshop was to introduce relevant tools to novice as well as more advanced users. After a short plenary introduction, we therefore split up the group where for the novice users the focus was on tools that are accompanied by a graphical user interface, like OpenRefine and Gephi; whereas we demonstrated API-based tools to the advanced users, such as the CLARIAH-incubated COW, grlc, Cultuurlink and ANANSI. Our setup, namely to have the participants convert their own dataset to Linked Data and query and visualise, was somewhat ambitious as we had not taken into account all data formats or encodings. Overall, participants were able to get started with some data, and ask questions specific to their use cases.

It is impossible to fully clean and convert and analyse a dataset in a single day, so the CLARIAH team will keep investigating ways to support researchers with their Linked Data needs. For now, you can check out the CultuurLink slides and tutorial materials from the workshop and keep an eye out on this website for future CLARIAH LOD events.

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Kickoff meeting Mixed Methods in the Humanities projects

Last week, the Volkswagen Stiftung-funded “Mixed Methods’ in the Humanities?” programme had its kickoff meeting for all funded projects in in Hannover, Germany. Our ArchiMediaL project on enriching and linking historical architectural and urban image collections was one of the projects funded through this programme and even though our project will only start in September, we already presented our approach,  the challenges we will be facing and who will face them (our great team of post-docs Tino Mager, Seyran Khademi and Ronald Siebes). Group picture. Can you spot all the humanities and computer science people?Other interesting projects included analysing of multi-religious spaces on the Medieval World (“Dhimmis and Muslims”); the “From Bach to Beatles” project on representing music and schemata to support musicological scholarship as well as the nice Digital Plato project which uses NLP technologies to map paraphrasing of Plato in the ancient world. An overarching theme was a discussion on the role of digital / quantitative / distant reading methods in humanities research. The projects will run for three years so we have some time to say some sensible things about this in 2020.

 

 

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EVENTS2017 workshop at SEMANTiCS

An important role in the interpretation of cultural heritage collections is played by ‘historic events’. In the SEMANTiCS workshop Events2017: Understanding Events Semantics in Cultural Heritage, to be held on 11 Sept 2017, we will investigate and discuss challenges around identifying, representing, linking and reasoning about historical events. We invite full papers (8p) as well as short papers (4p) on this topic.

The call for papers is out now.  You have until July 10, 2017 to submite your contribution. Contributions can include original research papers, position papers, or papers describing tools, demonstrators or datasets. Accepted contributions will be published on the CEUR-WS website (or equivalent).

More information at https://events2017workshop.wordpress.com/

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