Last week, I visited the 11th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (MTSR2017) in Tallinn, Estonia. This conference brings together computer scientists. information scientists and people from the domain of digital libraries to discuss their work in metadata and semantics. The 2017 edition of the conference draws around 70 people which is a great size for a single-track conference with lively discussions. The paper included interesting tracks on Cultural Heritage and Library (meta)data as well as one on Digital Humanities.
On the last day I presented our paper “Enriching Media Collections for Event-based Exploration” [draft pdf], co-authored with the people in the CLARIAH and DIVE+ team working on data enrichment and APIs: Liliana Melgar, Oana Inel Carlos Martinez Ortiz, Lora Aroyo and Johan Oomen. The slides for the presentation can be found here on slideshare. We were very happy to hear that our paper was presented the MTSR2017 Best Paper Award!
In the paper, we present a methodology to publish, represent, enrich, and link heritage collections so that they can be explored by domain expert users. We present four methods to derive events from media object descriptions. We also present a case study where four datasets with mixed media types are made accessible to scholars and describe the building blocks for event-based proto-narrativesin the knowledge graph
The paper was co-authored by Victor de Boer, Oana Inel, Lora Aroyo, Chiel van den Akker, Susane Legene, Carlos Martinez, Werner Helmich, Berber Hagendoorn, Sabrina Sauer, Jaap Blom, Liliana Melgar and Johan Oomen
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
.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.
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.
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.
Here’s the submission to the annual LODLAM challenge from the DIVE+ team. In this video, we introduce the ideas behind DIVE+ and take you for a exploratory swim in the linked media knowledge graph!
On 21 and 22 March, researchers from VU’s Web and Media group attended ICT.OPEN, the principal ICT research conference in the Netherlands. Here over 500 scientists from all ICT research disciplines & interested researchers from industry come together to learn from each other, share ideas and network. The conference featured some great keynote speeches, including one from Nissan’s Erik Vinkhuyzen on the role of anthropological and sociological research to develop better self-driving cars. Barbara Terhal from Aachen University gave a challenging, but well-presented talk on the challenges regarding robustness for quantum computing.
As last year, the Web and Media group this year was well represented through multiple oral presentations with accompanying posters and demonstrations :
Oana Inel, Carlos Martinez and Victor de Boer presented DIVEplus. Oana did such a good job presenting the project in the main programme (see Oana’s DIVE+@ICTOpen2017 slides), through the demo and in front of a poster that the poster was selected as best Poster in the SIKS track.
Benjamin Timmermans, Tobias Kuhn and Tibor Vermeij presented the Controcurator project with a demonstration and poster presentation. In the demo the ControCurator human-machine framework for identifying controversy in multimodal data is shown.
Tobias Kuhn discussed “Genuine Semantic Publishing” in the Computer Science track on the first day. His slides can be found here. After the talk there was a very interesting discussion about the role of the narrative writing process and how it would relate to semantic publishing.
Ronald Siebes and Victor de Boer then discussed how Big and Linked Data technologies developed in the Big Data Europe project are used to deliver pharmacological web-services for drug discovery. You can read more in Ronald’s blog post.
Benjamin Timmermans and Zoltan Zslavik also presented the CrowdTruth demonstrator, which is shown in this short demonstrator video.
Sabrina Sauer presented the MediaNow project with a nice poster titled MediaNow – using a living lab method to understand media professionals’ exploratory search.
In today’s network society there is a growing need to share, integrate and search in collections of various libraries, archives and museums. For researchers interpreting these interconnected media collections, tools need to be developed. In the exploratory phaseof research the media researcher has no clear focus and is uncertain what to look for in an integrated collection. Data Visualization technology can be used to support strategies and tactics of interest in doing exploratory research
The DIVE tool is an event-based linked media browser that allows researchers to explore interconnected events, media objects, people, places and concepts (see screenshot). Maartje Kruijt’s research project involved investigating to what extent and in what way the construction of narratives can be made possible in DIVE, in such a way that it contributes to the interpretation process of researchers. Such narratives can be either automatically generated on the basis of existing event-event relationships, or be constructed manually by researchers.
The research proposes an extension of the DIVE tool where selections made during the exploratory phase can be presented in narrative form. This allows researchers to publish the narrative, but also share narratives or reuse other people’s narratives. The interactive presentation of a narrative is complementary to the presentation in a text, but it can serve as a starting point for further exploration of other researchers who make use of the DIVE browser.
Within DIVE and Clariah, we are currently extending the user interface based on the recommendations made in the context of this thesis. You can read more about it in Maartje Kruijt’s thesis (Dutch). The user stories that describe the needs of media researchers are descibed in English and found in Appendix I.
Below you find some impressions from ICT.Open 2016. At this very nice event members from the Web and Media group and VU master students presented their ICT research.
The images show me presenting the Observe project’s achievements so far. Oana Inel presenting the DIVE demo, Anca and Oana accepting the SIKS poster award, Gossa Lo presenting Kasadaka to demo jury members, three Web and Media posters and a nice presenation from Google on AlphaGo.
During last week’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2014) in Riva del Garda, the DIVE team presented a demonstration prototype of the DIVE tool (which you can play around with live at http://dive.beeldengeluid.nl) . We submitted DIVE to the Open Track of the yearly Semantic Web Challenge for SW tools and applications. Initially, we were invited to give a poster presentation on the first day of the conference and after very positive reviews, we progressed to the challenge final.
For this final we were asked to present the tool and give a live demonstration in front of the ISWC2014 crowd. Apparently the jury appreciated the effort since DIVE was awarded the third prize. The prize included a nice certificate as well as $1000,- sponsored by Elsevier.
This was a real team effort, but I think much of the praise goes to our partners at Frontwise. They built a very cool, very responsive and intuitive User Experience on top of our SPARQL endpoint. Great work! Also thanks to the people at Beeld en Geluid and KB for their assistance with delivering data in a timely fashion and of course the people at VU for their enrichment of the data. Great teamwork everyone! Embedded below you find the poster and the presentation. The paper is found here.