Number 86, July 2011 ERCIM NEWS European Research Consortium for and Mathematics www.ercim.eu

Special theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

Also in this issue:

Keynote ICT and Cultural Heritage: Research, Innovation and Policy byKhalilRouhana

JointERCIMActions University of Cyprus joins ERCIM

ResearchandInnovation Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of a Nanoparticle at Atomic Resolution byJoostBatenburgandSandravanAert Editorial Information

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Next issue October 2011, Special theme: “Ambient Assited Living”

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 Keynote

ICT and Cultural Heritage: Research, Innovation and Policy

he ‘European Competitiveness Report 2010’ identified aims at making Europe’s cultural resources and scientific the cultural and creative industries as one of Europe’s records easy to use for leisure, work or studies. It is also des- Tmost dynamic sectors, accounting for 3.3% of EU GDP tined to act as a hub for the creative industries, facilitating and 3% of employment. Beyond this important contribution to the use of cultural resources in innovative products and serv- GDP, the creative and cultural sectors are indeed a vehicle of ices. Europeana currently gives direct access to more than 19 significant lifestyle changes and progress, including the devel- million digitized objects from more than 1,500 cultural insti- opment of modern skills, adapting teaching and learning and tutions. It will reach 30 million by 2015. inter-generational and intercultural dialogues. 3. Financing R&D and innovation: In 2011-12, the Digital technologies continue to radically transform our Commission is investing around 100 M€ per year in tech- approach to creativity and culture. They modify not only the nologies for digital content and cultural heritage. Support way we access and preserve cultural goes to research and innovation in tools assets but they also provide us with for content creation, access and preserva- unique tools to better create and commu- tion. It targets application areas spanning nicate. ICT has become a major vehicle from cultural arts to entertainment and for enriching our "creative capital" that education. The underpinning technolo- underpins our societal vitality, our eco- gies include vision, advanced nomic growth and ability to compete on a graphics, and global scale. tools, 3D immersive environments, cog- nitive systems, multi sensorial interac- This is why digital content, is one of the tions and semantic based content search. important policy areas of the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE). The policy The EU investment has helped to build a aim is to strengthen Europe’s cultural cre- solid research community bridging the ativity, develop further the internal gap between traditional ways of dealing market for digital content, preserve our with cultural heritage and the opportuni- cultural resources and make them widely ties offered by ICT. For example, The accessible to all citizens. Khalil Rouhana, EU-funded project V-City - The Virtual Director, Digital Content & Cognitive Systems City (http://vcity.diginext.fr) aims at an The DAE approach consists of three European Commission, DG Information innovative system for reconstructing, interlinked pillars: Society and Media visualizing and exploiting complete, 1. Creating the best framework condi- large-scale and interactive urban environ- tions for the creation and diffusion of ments. The technology (combining com- cultural assets including copyright puter vision, 3D modelling and virtual issues and open access: A new copyright strategy has been reality) can be used by archaeologists and other cultural her- suggested by the Commission in May 2011 that clarifies the itage professionals, or for business intelligence. Another legal framework for digitizing cultural heritage, making it example is the EU-Funded project eCUTE (http://ecute.eu/) accessible to all and unlocking the potential for its re-use. It developing a tool for cultural understanding and empathy in includes notably a legislative proposal on orphan works in children and young adults. It uses a view of culture based on view of facilitating the digitization of millions of works that intercultural sensitivity model. In terms of structuring and are in copyright, but for which the right-holders cannot be coordination, the Network of Excellence GaLA on Serious found. Games for education and training aims at building a European Virtual Research Centre on Serious Games 2. Supporting the effort of digitization of all European cultural (http://www.elios.dibe.unige.it/gala/). content and providing a platform for aggregating digitized cultural resources with an easy and single access point: By combining policy, research and innovation, the DAE Digitizing our cultural heritage is a huge task. A recent actions aim at making our cultural heritage a driver for innova- report has estimated the cost of digitizing our entire cultural tion and creativity and to enable the wider diffusion of heritage at 100 billion euro, highlighting the need for careful European culture and values worldwide. "We only live to dis- planning, since public money is scarce and duplication of cover beautiful things, all the rest is just waiting..." These effort should be avoided. At the same time the sheer magni- words of the poet explain well our continuous quest to create tude of the effort calls for private investments in digitization, and to access and preserve cultural resources, these millions of not least because the private sector will hugely benefit from "beautiful things" for generations to live for. a thriving content ecosystem in Europe. The views expressed in the article are the sole responsibility of A central pillar in Europe’s strategy in this area is the author and in no way represent the view of the European Europeana, Europe’s digital , archive and museum. It Commission and its services.

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 3 JCoointe EnRtsCIM Actions

SPECIAL THEME

Martin Doerr, FORTH-ICS and David Arnold, University of Brighton, UK have been guest editors for this special theme section on “ICT for Cultural Heritage”

2 Editorial Information Introduction to the Special Theme 10 ICT for Cultural Heritage KEYNOTE by Martin Doerr and David Arnold

3 ICT and Cultural Heritage: Research, 12 Semi-automatic 3D Acquisition and Reassembly of Cultural Innovation and Policy Heritage:The SeARCH Project by Khalil Rouhana, by Patrick Reuter, Nicolas Mellado, Xavier Granier, Isabelle Hairy, Director, Digital Content & Cognitive Systems Robert Vergnieux and Nadine Couture European Commission, DG Information Society and Media 14 Digital Acquisition and Structural Analysis of the “Rognosa” Tower in San Gimignano by Maria Girardi, Cristina Padovani, Marco Callieri and JOINT ERCIM ACTIONS Massimiliano Corsini

6 University of Cyprus joins ERCIM 15 Real-World Geometry and Generative Knowledge by Marios Dikaiakos by Thomas Schiffer, Christoph Schinko, Torsten Ullrich and Dieter W. Fellner 7 ERCIM Evolves with New Organisational Structure 16 Digital Documentation of World Heritage: The Scottish Ten Project 8 fet11 Conference a Great Success by Douglas Pritchard and Daisy Abbott

9 ERCIM Alain Bensoussan Fellowship 18 3D-COFORM: A Large-Scale Digital Production Environment Programme by Katerina Tzompanaki, Martin Doerr, Maria Theodoridou and Sven Havemann

19 Attaching Semantics to Document Images Safeguards our Cultural Heritage by Elena Console, Anna Tonazzini and Fabio Bruno

21 Tangible Culture - Designing Virtual Exhibitions on Multi- Touch Devices by Martin Hecher, Robert Möstl, Eva Eggeling, Christian Derler and Dieter W. Fellner

22 VISITO Tuscany: Landmark Recognition for Cultural Heritage by Giuseppe Amato, Fabrizio Falchi and Paolo Bolettieri

23 National Gallery in Prague by Stanislav Mikeš, Michal Haindl and Radek Holub

25 Macedonia: From Fragments to Pixels by Xenophon Zabulis, Dimitrios Grammenos, Antonis A. Argyros, Dimitrios Sifakis and Constantine Stephanidis

26 Discovering Knowledge from Sumerian Economic Documents by Wojciech Jaworski

28 Multimodal Computer-Assisted Transcription of Ancient Documents by Verónica Romero, Alejandro Héctor Toselli, Enrqiue Vidal, Elsa Cubel and Joan Andreu Sánchez

29 Reducing OCR Errors in Gothic-Script Documents by Lenz Furrer and Martin Volk

4 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 RESEARCH AND INNOvATION

This section features news about research 30 Deciphering the Story of the Museum activities and innovative developments from by Eoin Kilfeather European research institutes

32 Non-linear Digital Storytelling for the Battleship 52 Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of a “G. Averof” Nanoparticle at Atomic Resolution by Ralf Klamma and Yiwei Cao by Joost Batenburg and Sandra van Aert

33 YUMA – Crowd Sourced Metadata Enrichment for Online 53 Robust Methods for Image Processing in Collections Anthropology and Biomedicine by Joachim Jung, Rainer Simon and Bernhard Haslhofer by Jan Kalina

34 Tidy City: Learning about Cultural Heritage through a User- 54 DIRECT: the First Prototype of the Created Mobile Game PROMISE Evaluation Infrastructure for by Richard Wetzel Experimental Evaluation 35 Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a User Generated by Nicola Ferro Content Service for Europeana by Nicola Aloia, Cesare Concordia, Anne van Gerwen, Carlo 55 Potential Cell-phone Dangers: Latest Meghini and N. Zeni Studies by Harry Rudin 36 Visual Semantic Browsing - A New Way to Access Digital Collections 57 Crowdsourcing Culture with a Twist by Alan Payne and Peter Fry by Pär Hansson

38 Data Quality of Public Heritage Data in Professional 58 Building a Building for Nanotechnology Applications by Harry Rudin by Jacco van Ossenbruggen

39 Discovering Europeana Users’ Search Behaviour EvENTS byDiego Ceccarelli, Sergiu Gordea, Claudio Lucchese, Franco Maria Nardini, Raffaele Perego and Gabriele Tolomei 59 4th Summer School on Network and 40 Preparing the Ground for the German by Kai Stalmann, Marion Borowski and Sven Becker 59 Facilitating an Indian Delegate’s Participation at the ICT Proposers’ Day 42 Managing and Archiving : The GAMELAN 2011 Project by Tom Williamson by Jérôme Barthélemy 60 Announcements 43 The Open Kunstkammer Data Project by Vladimir Ivanov IN BRIEf 44 Pat.mapa: Linking Catalan Cultural Heritage by Mercè López, Oriol Almirall and Sergi Fernández 63 Jos Baeten New General Director of CWI

46 GeoMemories: A Spatial-Temporal Atlas of the Italian 63 Marie–Paule Cani Winner of the Landscape Eurographics Outstanding Technical by Andrea Marchetti, Elizabeth Jane Shepherd and Maurizio Contributions Award 2011 Tesconi 63 Twenty-Five Years .nl Domain 47 Nephele – Smart Digital Memory of Artwork Conservation by Barbara Zitová, Miroslav Beneš and Janka Hradilová

49 Soft Sensors: The New Frontier in Measurement for Non- Invasive Monitoring of Cultural Heritage Sites by Umberto Maniscalco and Giovanni Pilato

50 Mathematical Models for Copper Sulphation by Fabrizio Clarelli, Barbara De Filippo, and Roberto Natalini

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 5 Joint ERCIM Actions

University of Cyprus joins ERCIM

by Marios Dikaiakos

TheUniversityofCyprus(UCY)isdelightedtojoinERCIM asits19thmember.UCYisrepresentedinERCIMby boththeFacultyofPureandAppliedSciencesandthe FacultyofEngineeringthroughtheDepartmentof ComputerScienceandtheDepartmentofElectricaland ComputerEngineeringrespectively.Dedicatedto producingandpromotinghigh-endresearch,UCYstrives Research at the Unviversity of Cyprus. toestablishapositionattheforefrontofEuropean research.Inthatrespect,participationinERCIMis expectedtofurtherenhancethestronglinksthatUCY haswithotherEuropeanacademicandresearch • (knowledge representation, plan- institutions. ning, agents, cognitive neuroscience, neural networks) • Computer (multicore architecture, The University of Cyprus was established in 1989, as the power and temperature aware micro-, first public University of the country, and admitted its first dataflow) students in 1992. Since then the University has developed • and Information Management (mobile and fully fledged undergraduate and graduate programmes wireless data management, sensor networks, information within all its departments and managed to host an academic retrieval) community of 424 faculty members, 6240 students (4691 of • (virtual and augmented reality, graph- whom are undergraduates and 1549 postgraduates) and 352 ics) administrative staff members. Research is the basic strategic • Computer Networks (fixed, wireless, ad hoc and vehicular element for the University´s continuous growth. During the networks) last few years the University of Cyprus has managed to • and Web Technologies (cloud & acquire important research funding mainly from external , content distribution networks) sources with the major contributor being the European Union • (context-aware services, middle- (circa 40%). The quantity and quality of the research pro- ware, component-based software engineering) grams present stable and high indices of growth, which • Theoretical (distributed , shows the efficiency and effectiveness of the research activi- fault-tolerance, algorithmic game theory, concurrency the- ties sustained at the University. ory, ).

The Department of Computer Science Over the last 6 years, the Computer Science Department has (http://www.cs.ucy.ac.cy) undertakes world-class, high- been involved in more than 130 research projects funded by impact research in many areas of Computer Science, both the European Union and the Cyprus Research including: Promotion Foundation with a total funding of over 13 mil- lion Euros. Currently, the Department has 21 faculty mem-

Students at the Department of Computer Science.

6 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 bers and 64 research staff members. The Department offers a Bachelor degree in Computer Science, four Master degrees ERCIM Evolves with New in Computer Science, Internet Computing, Intelligent Systems and Advanced IT (professional), and a Ph.D. degree Organisational Structure in Computer Science. It hosts an advanced research infra- structure including cloud, grid and high-performance com- With the first general assembly of the ERCIM association puting resources, advanced and visualization (AISBL - association internationale sans but lucratif; interna- equipment, and wireless sensor network and mobile com- tional not-for-profit association) in Trondheim, Norway, 10 puting facilities. June 2011, ERCIM has accomplished a major organisational restructuring. An important change in ERCIM’s membership The Department of Electrical and policy is coinciding with the creation of ERCIM AISBL. (ECE) was established in 2003. In a relatively short period of ERCIM is now open to multiple members per country while time it has managed to establish high quality research, retaining its membership criteria of excellence and active teaching and outreach activities in numerous fields, namely: participation. The aim is to build a strong European commu- Biomedical Engineering nity of research organisations to promote science, research • Computer Networks and innovation. • Digital Hardware Design and Embedded Systems • Electronics and Microelectronics For more than 20 years, ERCIM has operated as a grouping • Robotics, Instrumentation of members and associates, one per country, working cooper- • Sensors, and Nanotechnology atively. During recent years, the number of European • Intelligent Systems and Control research organisations in information and communication • Microwaves and Photonics technologies and applied mathematics has increased consid- • Power and Renewable Energy erably. ERCIM is evolving to maintain its position as the • Signal and Image Processing main recognized expert grouping in Europe and to increase • Telecommunication Systems its impact on European strategy and policy. The ERCIM • Trustworthy System Design. community, continuing its mission ‘Cooperating for Excellence in Research’, is now supported by two organisa- As of December 2010, it has 15 full-time academic staff, and tions: The ERCIM association (AISBL) and the ERCIM this number is projected to rise over the coming years. In the European Economic Interest Group (EEIG). first few years of the department´s existence, the faculty was awarded more than 75 research projects and grants in the ERCIM AISBL aforementioned fields, with a combined budget of approxi- The ERCIM not-for-profit international association is car- mately €15 mil., 60% of which coming from the EC. This rying out and supervising all scientific activities of ERCIM. funding success continues, and is considered essential to the future aspirations to be a leading centre of ECE in Europe. ERCIM EEIG The ERCIM European Economic Interest Group is com- UCY considers research as a basic strategic element for its posed of a subset of members from the association, hosting continuous growth. In joining ERCIM, we anticipate that the ERCIM office and the European branch of the World UCY will advance its research prospects and capabilities. Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Evidently, ERCIM can act as the medium to strengthen partner ties and expand strategic collaborations. Moreover, it During the first general assembly, the association elected the can provide great assistance in the attraction of, and partici- board of the association composed of the following mem- pation in EC funded projects. Indirectly, via increased bers: research activity, both departments can shape their research • President: Keith Jeffery, STFC, UK and teaching curricula in a way that reflects modern aca- • Vice-President: Domenico Laforenza, IIT-CNR, Italy demic and industrial thinking and state of the art technology. • Treasurer: Dick Broekhuis, CWI,The Netherlands Consequently, the University of Cyprus is delighted to join • Secretary: Jerzy Tiuryn, University of Warsaw, Poland ERCIM and looks forward to being an active participant. Three members of staff will represent UCY in ERCIM, pro- and in addition: fessor Marios Dikaiakos as the representative in the ERCIM • Dimitris Plexousakis, Institute of Computer Science, general member assembly with Dr. Theocharis Theocharides Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH) – Hel- as his substitute. Professor George Papadopoulos represents las, Greece and Patrick Furrer, Swiss Association for UCY on the ERCIM News editirial board. Research in Information Technology (SARIT), Switzer- land, jointly responsible for scientific aspects (projects, Link: working groups) http://www.cs.ucy.ac.cy/ • Claude Kirchner, INRIA, France, responsible for human capital Please contact: • Andreas Rauber, AARIT, Austria, responsible for out- Marios Dikaiakos reach. University of Cyprus E-mail: [email protected] For more information, please contact the ERCIM office at [email protected]

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 7 Joint ERCIM Actions

11 11 More than a traditional scientific conference, fet was a fet Conference unique intellectual event which created an atmosphere of excitement for the opportunities presented by FET-type a Great Success research in Europe.

fet11,theEuropeanFutureTechnologiesConferenceand Recorded sessions Exhibition2011,heldinBudapest4-6May2011,wasthe All plenary sessions (keynotes, panel discussion, political secondeditionofanewforumdedicatedtofrontier adresses, closing ceremony) were recorded and can be researchininformationandcommunication viewed via the fet11 website. technologies.fet11 wasauniqueconferenceonvisionary, high-riskandlong-termresearchininformationscience Awards andtechnology.Featuringanexceptionallybroadrange The participants were invited to vote for the best exhibition and ofscientificfields,theeventseedednewideasacross poster. The following winners were awarded by the European disciplinesthatwillreshapethefuture. Commission with a beautiful glass sculpture made by the Hungarian artist Laszlo Lukacsi and sponsored by ERCIM: The conference, jointly organised by ERCIM, SZTAKI and • Exhibit first prize: “The future of biomimetic machines” the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Units (Open by Anna Mura et al. and Proactive) of the European Commission, exceeded all • Exhibit second prize: “A new kind of robot: expectations. It attracted more than 1000 participants and ECCEROBOT” by Owen Holland et al. received huge media coverage. It involved key policy • Exhibit third prize: “Future technologies to support makers, and featured a mix of seven keynotes, a panel dis- collaborative solutions for grand challenges (Biological

ERCIM President Michel Cosnard awarding a prize winner.

Zoltan Csefalvay, Hungarian Minister of State for Economic Strategy and Parliamentary Affairs, Neelie Kroes opens the exhibions. Ministry for National Economy.

cussion, 30 scientific sessions, 100 poster presentations and a water safety, Augmented collaboration, e-Infrastructures science cafe with energy-packed ignite-style presentations. for science)” by Szabolcs Tokes, Peter Galambos, Robert Hands-on exhibitions with 30 booths ran throughout, in par- Lovas et al allel to the conference, showcasing the latest research devel- • Poster first prize: “Simple formations in large societies of opments in future and emerging information technologies. tiny mobile artifacts” by Bastian Degener et al. • Poster second prize: “From sensorimotor knowledge to fet11 also marked the official launch of the FET Flagship Pilots abstract symbolic representations by Marek Rucinski et al. by Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission • Poster third prize: “Methodological bridges for complex and Commissioner for the European Digital Agenda. FET systems” by Emanuela Merelli et al. Flagships are large-scale initiatives that aim to achieve a visionary technological goal over 10 years with a budget of up Proceedings to one billion Euro for each Flagship. To prepare the launch of The scientific conclusions and perspectives from the the FET Flagships, six Pilot Actions were funded for one year keynotes, topical sessions, and posters are being published starting in May 2011. In the second half of 2012 two of the by Elsevier as proceedings entitled “fet11essence”. The pro- pilots will be selected and launched as full FET Flagship ceedings will be freely available from the fet11 website. Initiatives in 2013 (see http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/pro- gramme/fet/flagship/). More information: http://www.fet11.eu

8 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 • the fellowship is restricted to two terms (one reselection ERCIM Alain Bensoussan possible) • have completed the PhD before starting the grant. fellowship Programme • a member institute cannot host a candidate of the same nationality TheERCIMAlainBensoussanFellowship • a candidate cannot be hosted by a member institute, if by Programmeentersthethirdroundoffellowships the start of the fellowship, he or she has already worked in supportedbytheCOFUNDprogrammeofthe this institute for a total of six months or more, during the EuropeanCommissionwiththenextapplication last three years. deadline30October.Morethan50fellowhipshave alreadybeengrantedundertheCOFUNDscheme How are the fellows selected? andERCIMplanstoco-fundsomemore100more Each application is reviewed by scientists, and the criteria for fellowshipsduringthenexttwoyears. selection are: • scientific expertise of the applicant Who can apply? • quality of scientific publications The fellowships are available for PhD holders from all •relevance of the fellow’s research agenda over the world. •interest/added-value for the ERCIM consortium •previous mobility / professional experiences. What is the duration? Fellowships are generally of 24 months duration, spent The number of available positions depends on the needs of in two of the ERCIM institutes. A fellowship of 12 the member institutes and their available funding. months duration spent in one institute might also be offered. More information: http://fellowship.ercim.eu/

Application deadlines: Twice per year: 30 April and 30 September.

How to apply? Only online applications are accepted. The application form will be online one month prior to the application deadline.

Which topics/disciplines? Topics cover most disciplines in com- puter science, information technology, and applied mathematics.

Where are the fellows hosted? Fellows can be hosted at ERCIM member institutes only (the current   ! ERCIM member institutes are listed on the back page of this issue). When an    ERCIM member is a consortium (AARIT, CRCIM, IUA, PEG,   ! PLERCIM, SARIT, SpaRCIM) the    hosting institute might be any of the consortium’s members. When an ERCIM Member is a funding organisa- !" tion (FNR, FWO/FNRS), the hosting   institute might be any of their affili- ates.

What are the conditions? ! • have obtained a PhD degree during the last eight years (prior to the application deadline) or be in the last year of the thesis work • be fluent in English • be discharged or get deferment from military service

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 9 Introduction to the Special Theme ICT for Cultural Heritage

by Martin Derr and David Arnold

ICTs’useforCulturalHeritagehasbeengrowingveryfastaspartoftheexplosionindigitalartsand humanitiesresearchdrivenbybothpublicinterestinheritageandtheopportunitytoenhanceintellectual enquiryforArtsandHumanitiesresearchers.Societalinterestisatmanylevelsfromheritagethemesin entertainment,includingtourismandcomputergames,topoliticalinterestinheritageanditsaffectonour senseofidentityandcitizenship.Likeeducationandhealth,heritageispersonal,thoughinfluencedbythe collectivethroughcommonalitiesinpersonalexperiences.

The field is also maturing intellectually in a similar way to Increasingly, 3D digital model representations are providing ICT adoption in other fields, progressing through stages of: new challenges and opportunities2. Apart from data volume, replicating pre-existing manual processes; increasing inter- there are specific challenges concerning: metadata; the disciplinary collaboration and co-development and; co- semantics of shape; digital provenance; and long-term development of tools which could not have been conceived preservation. Some of these areas are also challenge digital or developed without the trust and understanding of previous texts, images and videos but become highlighted when stages. Leading research in digital humanities has reached working with 3D. Even more challenging is the integration this stage, which not only leads to novel techniques in arts of knowledge across multiple sources and their metadata. and humanities but in computer science. Stokes characterizes this type of result as “use-inspired basic research” which he Libraries and Digital Libraries have survived perfectly well places in Pasteur’s Quadrant in his scheme1. without information integration, providing good, homoge- neous finding aids for scholars who know which collection Cultural heritage may be considered as tangible (artefacts, to access. However a cultural-historical research space the written word and documentation) or intangible (oral tra- (museum, library or archive) provides access to primary dition, stories, performance, etc.), but the distinction may knowledge about objects in very different organizations and be illusory - written documents require interpretation; the archival material. The information in a museum or archive catalogue will not match the subject classifica- tion structure in a library context for example. Considerations of Use? The museum object is more like an illustration Research inspired by: or witness of the past, than the raw information No Y es in its own right, some of which may be held as curatorial interpretations within the museum Pure Basic Research Use-inspired basic research catalogue. Yes Quest for (Bohr) (Pasteur) fundamental Pure Applied Research Cultural historical research requires knowledge understanding No (Edison) of “possible pasts” –facts, events, material, social and psychological influences and motiva- Figure 1: Stokes’ Quadrant Model of Scientific Research (after [Stokes, 1997], p73) tions. It comes to life from understanding con- texts by pulling together and pieces of related facts from disparate resources, which can typically not be classified under subjects in significance of an object depends on the individual’s cul- an obvious way. It lives from taking into account all known tural context etc. ICTs are currently most commonly used facts. with the most tangible aspects, but the longer term chal- lenges, both for the humanities and for ICTs, lie with repre- With the advent of interconnected sources, researchers are senting and interrogating meaning, which inevitably spans expected to search data from geographically distributed both tangible and intangible. sources. This is impossible to achieve without ICT support

1 [Stokes, 1997] Stokes, Donald, E. (1997) Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation, The Brookings Institution, Washington (ISBN 0-8157-8177-6), pp180.

2 David Arnold and Guntram Geser, The EPOCH Research Agenda for the Applications of ICTs to Cultural Heritage. Full Report (May 2008) ISBN 978-963-9911-03-1, available on-line at http://www.epoch.eu

10 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 and sophisticated search tools. Video, image and 3D search, but automated search involves feature detection. To resources exacerbate these challenges with the embedded detect things produced by the same artist, we would have to semantics of image and shape that may not be explicitly define the artist’s “stylistic signatures” from features, as recorded in the digitized data and metadata, but require con- opposed to extracting from text metadata tags. New chal- tent-based analysis to understand the artefact’s “meaning”. lenges also arise in detecting co-referencing from digital models of shape and (say) texts that describe an artist’s life. All digitization generates new metadata, but with 3D addi- Finally, shape may represent conventional meaning for tional factors are involved. Models are produced by post- which there is no linguistic equivalent – gesture or analogy processing scanned or image data and models may be pro- for example. There is no agreed vocabulary of shape ele- duced using a variety of technologies and algorithms. ments which would underpin the detection of such meanings Understanding the data capture methods and modelling oper- from surface characteristics, although application such as ations may influence future humanities research. For face recognition and computer games interfaces may be example one study might compare the shape of two objects leading the way. (eg archaeological fragments) to determine whether they have common origins or analyse two models from different There is a long way to go before the full potential of ICTs for dates to determine whether they represent the same object Cultural Heritage is achieved. In the meantime, the articles in (for stolen artefacts) or have changed (for condition moni- this special issue illustrate the range of research in the field toring over time). The complexities of acquiring 3D mean and we look forward to seeing future developments which that different approaches are being taken to cater for the address these big challenges. objects’ physical properties. Techniques for acquiring building models are very different from those used for jew- The authors’ work which underpins this article has been sup- ellery or costumes for instance, which complicate the design ported by 3D-COFORM (“Tools and Expertise for 3D of search tools. Collection Formation” – http://www.3d-coform.eu) – a large scale integrating research project co-funded by the European 3D highlights other metadata challenges which are always Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007- there in principle but not often addressed. Digitizing a book 2013) under grant agreement no. 231809; 2008-2012. The may result in replicating the original – including the original objective is to improve 3D digitization tools and processes to pagination, headers and footnotes, and perhaps the hand- make 3D documentation a practical alternative for tangible written notations of various owners. Where appearance is cultural heritage. It builds on many of the challenges preserved by scanned images the challenge of relating image recorded in the EPOCH Research Agenda for the use of ICTs and text data remains. with tangible cultural heritage.

3D involves complex relationships because many artefacts are composed of sub-parts. Even apparently single items – Links: such as statues – may have several pieces. A complete The EPOCH Research Agenda for the Applications of ICTs building has many elements with their own interest – for to Cultural Heritage: example the decorative style permeated through dispersed http://public-repository.epoch-net.org/publications/ and recurring features. RES_AGENDA/research_agenda.pdf

Detecting segmentation and the inter-relation of parts chal- 3D COFORM project: lenges both the digital representation and search operations. http://www.3d-coform.eu The re-use of a sub-part may also complicate the relation- ships it represents – a jewel remounted, or the re-use of stone Please contact: from one historic building in a later building, for example. Martin Doerr FORTH-ICS, Greece At a deeper level, shape embodies semantics that are easily E-mail: [email protected] recognisable to the human eye but very difficult to analyse automatically. An archaeologist may recognise part of a cup David Arnold but automated detection from a collection of shards may be University of Brighton, UK unsolved. An expert may tag a shard as “cup” to simplify the E-mail: [email protected]

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 11 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

Semi-automatic 3D Acquisition and Reassembly of Cultural Heritage: The SeARCH Project

by Patrick Reuter, Nicolas Mellado, Xavier Granier, Isabelle Hairy, Robert Vergnieux and Nadine Couture

TheSeARCHresearchproject(Semi-automatic3DAcquisitionandReassemblyofCulturalHeritage) bringstogetherarcheologistsandcomputerscientistswithoneuniqueobjective:thevirtual reassemblyofbrokenartifacts,andespeciallythebrokenstatuesthatweresurroundingthe lighthouseofAlexandria.Thegatheringofresearchersofthesetwofundamentallydifferentscientific originsmakesitpossibletocombineexpertarcheologicalhigh-levelknowledgewiththepowerof computergraphicvisualizationtechniquesandgeometryprocessingalgorithms.Theintegrationof bothdisciplinesisachievedbydesigningefficienthuman-computerinteractiontechniquesthatuse semi-automaticgeometry-drivenacquisition,visualization,andreassemblytechniques.

Archeological artifacts are often broken Computer Graphics (INRIA Bordeaux used underwater, our acquisition into a large number of fragments, and, Sud-Ouest), and in Human Computer is based on photogrammetry when reassembling the fractured Interaction as well as simulation of and is quite simple: we take about a objects, cultural heritage professionals physical phenomena (ESTIA Research). hundred photographs per fragment cov- are confronted by huge three-dimen- ering the entire surface, with much less sional puzzles. The reassembly of the In this first half of the project, we identi- infrastructural effort than traditional fragments is generally done manually, fied three major achievements: first, the techniques. Then, salient feature points but this task can be very tedious, and in some cases impossible.

This is particularly true for the broken colossal statues that were surrounding the Lighthouse in Alexandria built in the 3rd century BC. The fragments were deteriorated by erosion, weathering, and the earthquakes in the 10th and 14th century AC. Most of the fragments are still underwater in the Mediterranean Sea, in a spectacular submarine archeo- Figure 1: Restitution of parts of the lighthouse and monuments raised beside it (© Isabelle logical site of about one hectare in area Hairy - CEAlex). next to Alexandria’s Eastern Harbor, and only a few fragments have been brought to the surface. Due to the availability of digital acquisition of the fragments of are identified automatically in every fragments at different locations with the surrounding statues, even those that photograph, and the correspondences of varying access policies, digitally are still underwater. Second, the expres- the same feature in different photo- acquiring the fragments and reassem- sive visualization that highlights details graphs are detected. This makes it pos- bling the corresponding 3D models vir- of the acquired fragments that are some- sible to infer the 3D positions of the fea- tually is probably the only feasible solu- times invisible to the human eye when tures, and hence to reconstruct the entire tion to reason about the past. inspecting the real fragments. Third, a 3D model with submillimeter accuracy. semi-automatic reassembly technique With this acquisition protocol, we have With this common objective in mind, in that allows an archeologist to drive even been able to reconstruct the 2009, the SeARCH project was born, a sophisticated geometry processing immersed fragments during an under- three year project funded by the French algorithms in order to find the most water acquisition campaign. So far, we Agence Nationale de la Recherche probable reassemblies. have reconstructed 15 fragments from (ANR). The SeARCH project strives to the submarine site, and 34 fragments develop semi-automatic techniques for Fragment acquisition from three different museums. the acquisition, visualization, and The first step in the virtual reassembly reassembly of the 3D models. This is the on-site digital acquisition of the Expressive visualization project gathers the experience of four fragments in order to obtain 3D models. Exploring the physical fragments on- research partners, specialized in From the 3000-plus available fragments site is sometimes difficult due to their Archeology (Centre d’Études on the archeological sites in Alexandria, size and the lighting conditions, espe- Alexandrines in Alexandria), in opera- the cultural heritage professionals iden- cially for underwater fragments. tional 3D scanning for Archeology tify those with the highest reassembly Conversely, the 3D models can be (Ausonius Archéovision at Bordeaux potential. Instead of using traditional inspected virtually in laboratory condi- University), in data processing for 3D laser range scanning that cannot be tions. We have developed novel expres-

12 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 Figure 2: An underwater photographer during the 3D acquisition, and the reconstructed 3D model.

sive visualization techniques that use that makes it possible to we are striving to develop a tangible differential geometry to find the best relatively position the two fragments as interaction tool so that archeologists can lighting conditions to highlight all the if they were in the user’s hands: in each easily make hypotheses about deforma- features from the fragments. In our con- hand, the user manipulates an electro- tions. text, this is particularly important since magnetically tracked prop, and the we have to distinguish between the fea- translations and rotations are directly Most of the members of the SeARCH tures of the fragment and the undesired mapped to the corresponding virtual project were involved in establishing V- effects from the century long suffered fragments on the computer screen when MusT.net, a European Network of erosions. Our visual enhancement tech- a corresponding foot pedal is pressed Excellence dedicated to Virtual niques stress features at different scales, down. During the manipulation of the Museums (2009-2013). Motivated by ranging from vast ridge and valley lines fragments, we provide feedback to the our attractive application case, we are to precise hand-made stone engravings. user in real-time by showing the geo- currently planning an exhibition at a Since all our techniques operate in real- metric error of the reassembly. museum to show the results of the time on the graphical processing unit Furthermore, we provide a visual repre- SeARCH project. after a short preprocessing step, the 3D sentation of the locally best match that fragments can be comfortably explored is computed by optimizing the geo- This work was supported by the ANR by cultural heritage experts, sometimes metric compatibility of the two frag- SeARCH project, grant ANR-09- revealing more detail than inspecting ments with respect to the fragments’ CORD-019 of the French Agence the physical fragments on-site. positions and orientations. Hence, the Nationale de la Recherche. virtual fragments virtually “snap” to the Semi-automatic reassembly locally optimal best match. The availability of accurate 3D models Links: allows the archeologists for the first Future work http://anr-search.labri.fr/ time to study the fragments coming For the remainder of the project, we will http://v-must.net from different locations in one coordi- continue to study the fragments with the nate frame. After visual exploration of challenging goal of finding new archeo- Please contact: the fragments, potential reassembly logically plausible reassemblies. We are Patrick Reuter candidates are identified. For the pair- also trying to physically model the phe- Bordeaux University, INRIA Bordeaux wise virtual reassembly, we designed nomena that happened to the fragments Sud-Ouest, LaBRI Bordeaux, France ArcheoTUI, an easy-to-use tangible during the deterioration. Furthermore, E-mail: [email protected]

Figure 4: ArcheoTUI, a tangible user interface that makes it possible to relatively position two fragments as if they were in the user?s hands. In each hand,the user manipulates a prop (items 1 and 2). For each prop, there is a corresponding foot pedal (items 3 and 4). Only when the corresponding foot pedal is pressed down, the translations and rotations are directly mapped to the Figure 3: Enhancing details with expressive corresponding virtual fragment on the visualization. display (items 5 and 6).

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 13 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

Digital Acquisition and Structural Analysis of the “Rognosa” Tower in San Gimignano

by Maria Girardi, Cristina Padovani, Marco Callieri and Massimiliano Corsini

Wepresentasetofintegratedtoolsdesignedanddevelopedforthedigitalacquisitionandstructural analysisofhistoricalmonumentsandbuildings.

The assessment of monuments requires various types of expertise and technolo- gies. The St@rt project (Sciences and Technologies for the Artistic, Architectural and Archaeological Tuscan heritage), funded by the region of Tuscany (Italy) for the three year period 2007-2010, aimed at integrating different research and administrative expertise in the field of cultural heritage. The pro- ject’s activities focused on the 13th cen- tury “Rognosa” tower in San Gimignano, included in the Unesco World Heritage List in 1990, as a case study. Figure 1: Acquisition of the tower’s geometry by means of a TOF laser scanner (on the left), We generated a finite element mesh of 3D digital model of the Rognosa tower and the Cathedral Square (on the right). the Rognosa tower using a three-dimen- sional digital model of the tower and the surrounding buildings, realized by a scanner data using MeshLab, an open architectonic heritage, their mechanical RIEGL time-of-flight (TOF) laser source software developed at the Visual behaviour is, as yet, not well known. In scanner. The tower’s surface was Computing Lab and other geometric pro- fact, their response to dynamic actions acquired from four different positions, cessing tools specifically designed to is nonlinear and heavily dependent on each selected to provide the best pos- build a 3D model starting from a set of the construction techniques utilized. sible coverage of one side and, at the acquired range maps. Acquisition of the Moreover, they are characterized, even same time, a good view of an adjacent tower’s inside geometry is impossible in the static case, by high compressive side, in order to facilitate the alignment because it is only accessible via an stresses that can cause additional process and provide coverage of all internal staircase and the view from damage in correspondence to openings details from multiple angles. below of its highest portion is partially or other geometrical irregularities. hidden by wooden floors. Thus, informa- Additional scans were carried out to tion about the geometry of the inner part The mechanical behaviour of the acquire the facade of the building encom- of the tower has been obtained via clas- tower was studied using the finite ele- passing the tower and the front arcade sical measuring methods. ment code NOSA, developed by the overlooking the square, where a portion Mechanics of Materials and Structures of the tower’s base is visible. The model Although masonry towers represent an Lab in which masonry is assumed to has been created by processing the laser important part of the world’s ancient be a nonlinear elastic material with

Figure 2 (left): Dynamic analysis: distribution of the stress Tzz (Pa) on the external surface of the tower at time 3.41 s.

Figure 3 (above): Dynamic analysis: relative x-displacement of the top of the bell chamber with respect to the top of the tower vs. time.

14 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 zero tensile strength and bounded Bell towers typically exhibit a certain Links: compressive strength. The behaviour vulnerability in correspondence with [1] The Mechanics of Materials and of the tower, subjected to its own the bell chamber, which is the struc- Structures Laboratory (MMS Lab) weight and to time-dependent loads ture’s highest element and is usually website: that model seismic excitations, was built separately from the rest of tower’s http://www.isti.cnr.it/research/unit.php? investigated. structure. Figure 3 shows the behaviour unit=MMS of the bell chamber pillars of the [2] The Visual Computing Laboratory After the static analysis, the tower was Rognosa tower during the earthquake. (VC Lab) website: subjected to the horizontal component The relative x-displacement of the top http://www.isti.cnr.it/research/unit.php? of the Nocera Umbra earthquake of of the bell chamber with respect to the unit=VC 1997. The Nocera Umbra earthquake top of the tower is plotted vs. time. For [3] The MeshLab website: lasted 41.30 s and generated a maximum the sake of comparison, the displace- http://meshlab.sourceforge.net acceleration (PGA) of 4.3192 m/s2. ment corresponding to the analysis per- [4] formed assuming the structure made of http://www.springer.com/materials/mec Figure 2 shows the distribution of stress a linear elastic material, is reported. hanics/book/978-3-540-79110-24 Tzz on the external surface of the tower at time t = 3.41s. The maximum The study highlights the importance of crashing damage is recognized at the developing integrated procedures tower’s base, while the maximum involving technologies of both visual Please contact: values of the fracture strain tensor are computing and computational Marco Callieri, Maria Girardi reached in the highest part of the tower, mechanics to obtain realistic models of ISTI-CNR, Italy focused near the openings and in corre- monumental structures in complex E-mail: [email protected], spondence with the bell chamber. architectural contests. [email protected]

Real-World Geometry and Generative Knowledge by Thomas Schiffer, Christoph Schinko, Torsten Ullrich and Dieter W. Fellner

Thecurrentmethodsofdescribingtheshapeofthree-dimensionalobjectscanbeclassifiedintotwo groups:compositionofprimitivesandproceduraldescription.Asa3Dacquisitiondevicesimply returnsanagglomerationofelementaryobjects(egalaserscannerreturnspoints)areal-worlddata setisalwaysa–moreorlessnoisy–compositionofprimitives.Agenerativemodel,ontheother hand,describesanidealobjectratherthanarealone.Owingtothisabstractviewofanobject, generativetechniquesareoftenusedtodescribeobjectssemantically.Consequently,generative models,ratherthanbeingareplacementforestablishedgeometrydescriptions(basedonpoints, triangles,etc.),offerasensible,semanticenrichment.

In combination with variance analysis systematics of generative models with general are obviously important in the techniques, generative descriptions can the realism and irregularities of real- context of electronic product data man- be used to enrich digitized artifacts. world data. In this way, digitized arti- agement, product life cycle manage- Detailed mesh comparisons can reveal facts can benefit from procedural mod- ment, data exchange and storage. the smallest changes and damage. These elling techniques: procedural models analysis and documentation tasks are include expert knowledge within its The approach implemented by valuable not only in the context of cul- object description; eg classification Fraunhofer Austria and CGV performs tural heritage but also in engineering and schemes used in architecture, archae- this semantic enrichment in three steps: manufacturing. ology and civil engineering can be The first step registers a generative mapped to procedures and algorithms, model (including its free parameters) to The Institut für ComputerGraphik und which realize a generative shape. the real-world data set. A generative WissensVisualisierung (CGV) at model can be regarded as a function, Technische Universität Graz and A generative description is like a shape which generates geometry, when called Fraunhofer Austria tackled this problem template (eg to construct a cup) with with some parameters. The registration and created a workflow, which automati- some free input parameters (eg height step analyzes such a function, identifies cally combines generative descriptions and radius). For a specific object only whether it can describe the given arti- with reconstructed artifacts and performs its type and its instantiation parameters fact, and if so it determines the best-fit a nominal/actual value comparison. The have to be identified. Identification is parameter set; ie no other parameter set bridge between both the generative and required by digital library services for can describe the digital artifact any the explicit geometry description is very markup, indexing and retrieval. The better (in combination with the genera- important: it combines the accuracy and classification and semantic meta data in tive function). In a second step, the dif-

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 15 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

reconstructed triangle mesh. Furthermore, an existing generative shape template of a vase with 13 degrees of freedom (ie 13 real-valued input parameters) has been passed to our workflow. The resulting X3D file describes the real-world geometry as well as the generative structure. Its included shader code is capable of applying the difference as displace- ments and allows a human viewer to switch selectively between the two model descriptions or displays both of them simultaneously (Figure 1 – right illustrates these results). The rendering shows the clean generative model (light red) for parts, which do not have a coun- Figure 1: Comparison between a reconstructed vase and the results of a generative enrichment terpart in the input data set, and the geo- with real-world geometry. The light red parts do not have a counterpart in the input data set, metric offset (light brown) for parts, whereas the light brown parts correspond to the input data set. which do have a corresponding part in the input data set.

ference between the best-fit generative The generated X3D file incorporates the There are some drawbacks when dis- model and the input scan is computed. following components: placing vertices on a curved surface The results of this variance analysis are • The geometry of the generative, best- (holes or overlaps appear) or when the stored in a simple texture. Finally, the fit reference mesh as indexed face set input data has no correspondence to the obtained variance can be visualized • A texture storing distance values to generative representation. These issues using X3D technology. The last step the digitized artifact will be the focus of future work. generates an X3D file containing the • Vertex, geometry and fragment best-fit generative model, the texture of shaders for displacement and lighting distance values and shader code capable purposes Links: of applying the difference as displace- http://www.cgv.tugraz.at/euclides ments. The X3D solution offers an inte- To demonstrate our workflow we use an http://www.fraunhofer.at/vc grated, standard compliant approach for example data set of the Museum http://www.arc3d.be visualization and documentation pur- Eggenberg collection. The vase (see poses. Furthermore, the standardized Figure 1 – left) has been reconstructed Please contact: X3D format is self-contained and does using the photogrammetric service Thomas Schiffer not depend on an external viewer appli- ARC3D (http://www.arc3d.be), which TU Graz, Austria cation. takes a set of photographs and returns a E-mail: [email protected]

Digital Documentation of World Heritage: The Scottish Ten Project

by Douglas Pritchard and Daisy Abbott

TheScottishTenprojectusescuttingedgetechnologytocreateexceptionallyaccuratedigitalmodels oftenUNESCOWorldHeritageSitesinordertobetterconserveandmanagethem.

Since 2009, the Digital Design Studio at raphy, 2D and 3D visualization soft- heritage sector, and provide precise dig- the Glasgow School of Art, Historic ware and other technologies. ital media to site managers to better care Scotland and the CyArk Foundation for the heritage resource. have been involved in a five-year project The objectives of the Scottish Ten to create precise 3-dimensional docu- project (http://www.scottishten.org) are Four of the overseas sites have been mentation of Scotland’s five UNESCO to record important historical sites for selected based upon Scottish World Heritage Sites and five interna- the benefit of future generations in Government international objectives in tional heritage sites. The project incor- Scotland and overseas, test emerging North America, Japan, India and China. porates an extensive use of aerial lidar, survey and documentation technologies Internationally, the projects encourage terrestrial laser scanning, HDR photog- to see how they can be employed in the the exchange of techniques and best

16 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 practices between the various agencies and build cultural connections. At the end of each international project, all of the data are given over to the site man- agers.

The acquired data from the Scottish Ten sites will be used for a number of pur- poses - from conservation practice to education programme development. Measured drawings and intensity values generated by the laser scanners will enable the Scottish and international site managers to better identify prob- lems and quantify any decay of the Figure 1: 3D point cloud rendering of Maes Howe from the Neolithic Orkney Scottish Ten project. monuments. At the same time, the data will be used to enhance interpretative The combined 6 member Glasgow international heritage site. The well was and education programmes through the School of Art/Historic Scotland team built in 1050AD and consists of six use of dimensionally accurate and pho- will be documenting the Village Bay stepped terraces into the ground. The torealistic 3D modelling. This will pro- settlement area and other parts of the walls are adorned with over 400 Hindu vide unprecedented virtual access to the archipelago during the early summer. sculptures. The team will begin docu- sites that may be restricted or closed to Weather permitting; the site documenta- mentation work at the end of September the public. tion work will last for two weeks. The 2011. Antoine Wall project is scheduled to Of the Scottish UNESCO sites, New begin in 2012. On the 21st and 22nd September the Lanark and Neolithic Orkney have been Scottish Ten project will feature promi- thoroughly documented and modelled. Internationally, the Mount Rushmore nently at the 2011 Digital Both sites were extensively terrestrially National Memorial in South Dakota Documentation Conference in Glasgow laser scanned and digitally pho- was thoroughly documented in May (http://www.digitaldocumentation.co.u tographed. The documentation of the 2010. The project was challenging, in k/). In November 2011, the results from world heritage zone within the city of part due to the terrain but also because St. Kilda project will be showcased at Edinburgh is currently under develop- of erratic weather conditions. To cap- the UNESCO Remote Access ment. A lidar-based 3D model has been ture the entire surface area of the Conference in Edinburgh. recently completed and the terrestrial sculpted monument, a custom-manufac- scanning will begin later this summer. tured rig was used to position the laser Given its size and the number of build- scanner on each of the four Presidents’ Link: ings within the World Heritage Site, this faces. The procedure was physically http://www.scottishten.org is an ambitious undertaking and the demanding and relied heavily on the project is expected to be completed by expertise of the US Parks Technical Please contact: the end of 2012. Ropes Team. Douglas Pritchard Glasgow School of Art, UK The planning for the fourth site, the The Rani ki Vav (Queen’s Stepwell) in Tel: +44 141 566 1452 islands of St. Kilda, is well underway. Gujarat, India is intended as the next E-mail: [email protected]

Figure 2: The Rani ki vav / the Queens Step Figure 3: 3D point cloud rendering of the four sculpted presidents from the Mount Rushmore Well, Patan India. Scottish Ten project.

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 17 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

3D-COfORM: A Large-Scale Digital Production Environment

by Katerina Tzompanaki, Martin Doerr, Maria Theodoridou and Sven Havemann

Thesystematiclarge-scaleproductionofdigitalscientificobjects,suchas3Dmodels,requiresmuch moreinfrastructurethanaclassicaldigitalarchiveconnectedtoaworkflowmanager.Thesizeofthe datatobehandled,thedistributionofexpertise,acquisitionandproductionsites,andthecomplexity oftheprocessesinvolvedrequireaninnovativeintegratedenvironmentthatcombinescontent managementandinformationretrieval(IR)serviceswithacentralizedknowledgemanagementin ordertomonitor,manageanddocumentprocessesandproductsinaflexiblemanner.

The 3D-COFORM project aims to objects, post-processing, and down to offered by specialized companies only advance the state-of-the-art in 3D-digiti- the final 3D products. Furthermore, it is in their premises, which results in data zation and to make 3D-documentation of designed to support their use and reuse distribution. The acquisition is often cultural and other material objects an in presentations and the scientific dis- costly, or even unique, requiring data everyday practice by providing an inte- course about the modelled objects and replication. Data may be sensitive, or in grated environment of services. The their features, for art conservation, vir- the terabytes scale, making access implementation and research period tual reconstruction or hypothesis rights, location and transfer an issue. started in December 2008 with a duration building about historical provenance Selection of data, manual processes, of 48 months (European Community’s and use. The distinctive innovation of refinements, re-processing with FP7 IP n° 231809; 2008-2012). the RI is that it can store the complete improved methods, taking a series of processing history of the digital artifact, measurements etc. contribute to the As part of this project, the 3D-COFORM its digital provenance. It is this feature need of a centralized, integrated knowl- Repository Infrastructure (RI) was that allows assessment of the authen- edge management in order to cope with designed and is being implemented as a ticity of the resulting high-quality defining the ultimate products, rea- sustainable, distributed repository for a model, and reasoning about its proper- soning about their properties, and massive quantity of large digital objects ties, fidelity and fitness for purpose. garbage collection. and their metadata capturing scientific descriptions and monitoring all Data acquisition for 3D models may The RI offers the aforementioned fea- processes of data generation and pro- take place in a studio, but more com- tures through a central entry point, the cessing. The RI is designed to allow dif- monly one has to go to the physical RI-API webservice, following a highly ferent kinds of user (researchers, aca- objects themselves, which may involve compatible SOA approach (SOAP). demics, web users, etc) to store, manage, mobile equipment, open-air conditions, Behind it there is a webservice-exten- query and retrieve whatever temporary lack of network connections and sible Cloud Computing System (CCS) and permanent digital objects are created reduced local processing capabilities. that can interface to other CCSs and in the course of digitizing physical Particular processing services may be Linked Open Data (LoD) based serv-

Figure 1: Overview of the Repository Infrastructure architecture: The clients communicate with the repository via SOAP through a central webservice. The RI dispatches the requests to its components (the MR, OR, and CRI Services). Data transfer is performed directly between clients and OR nodes, as initiated by the OR Service which controls the distributed OR nodes.

18 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 ices. The essential internal components proliferation needs to be faithfully cate URIs in the semantic network of the RI are: (a) the Object Repository recorded and controlled. without loosing their provenance. This (OR), a distributed mass data storage feature acts as a "mending" mechanism layer, (b) the Metadata Repository The Metadata Repository (MR) is an of the semantic network and will con- (MR), an integrated semantic network RDF triple store that aims at providing a tribute significantly to the reasoning layer, () the Content Retrieval Indices common place to reason on, query, performance and the future connection (CRI) for different search modalities by manipulate and export provenance into a Linked Open Data (LoD) world. several content modules, and (d) the metadata concerning any temporary or Query Manager (QM), which provides permanent object stored in the OR and The responsibility for the RI design and a single homogeneous access point to related metadata about the modelled implementation is shared between query the three components. The RI reality. Metadata are recorded in files in FORTH-ICS (Greece) and CGV, TU- offers a central thumbnail and the units of creation, physically backed- Graz (Austria), while other partners in provides a webservice for handling http up in the OR together with their related the Project deal with the creation of a thumbnail management requests. content files, while in the MR a rich Integrated Visual Browser interface semantic network is built with the inte- to the RI and an immense spectrum of The Object Repository (OR) connects grated metadata information. The MR is 3D tools, all integrated via the RI. to a (potentially large) number of dis- based on a homogeneous global schema tributed OR nodes for the physical data - an extension of the CIDOC CRM storage. The central OR Service pro- (ISO21127) that models provenance vides access security, data integrity and metadata (CRMdig). It comprises phys- Links: risk-of-loss control, including metadata ical object descriptions, annotations and 3D-COFORM Project: backup. It consists of a relational data- co-reference information, format and http://www.3d-coform.eu/ base (ORDB) for data file management, compatibility information of 3D CIDOC CRM: http://www.cidoc-crm.org/ the query manager (QM) for mapping models, historical events, and real CIDOC CRM v5.0.2 Encoded in the relational database to the RDF world objects. All this information is RDFS: format, the DT-Controller module for stored in a coherent semantic network http://www.cidoc-crm.org/rdfs/cidoc-crm controlling the data transfer between that enables useful and complex infer- CRMdig 2.5 Encoded in RDFS: client and OR nodes, and ences to support content management http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl/rdfs/3D- between OR nodes (replica manage- and research, comprising even diverse COFORM_CRMdig.rdfs ment). The distinctive feature of the OR content indexing and retrieval mecha- component is that all data transfers are nisms for 3D objects. An integral part of Please contact: logged for legal reasons: Not only the the MR is the Annotation and Co-refer- Katerina Tzompanaki, Martin Doerr, acquisition and post-processing of dig- ence Manager (ACoRM). The Maria Theodoridou ital 3D assets are expensive, but high- Annotation Manager connects links into FORTH-ICS, Greece quality 3D models can even be used for content segments of any kind and E-mail: {katetzob, martin, creating a high-quality physical replica, dimension (areas with no modifications maria}@ics.forth.gr eg, through 3D-printing. So it is on the original object), with semantic becoming ever more widely understood information capturing the related scien- Sven Havemann that 3D datasets are valuable assets that tific discourse. The Co-reference CGV, TU-Graz, Austria must be treated carefully, and that their Manager allows for collapsing dupli- E-mail: [email protected]

Attaching Semantics to Document Images Safeguards our Cultural Heritage by Elena Console, Anna Tonazzini and Fabio Bruno

Extractingandarchivinginformationfromdigitalimagesofdocumentsisoneofthegoalsofthe projectAMMIRA(multispectralacquisition,enhancing,indexingandretrievalofartifacts),ledbyTea- Sas,aservicefirmbasedinCatanzaro,Italy,withthecollaborationoftwoItalianresearchteams, theInstituteofInformationScienceandTechnologiesofCNRinPisa,andtheDepartmentof MechanicalEngineeringoftheUniversityofCalabriainCosenza.AMMIRAissupportedbyEuropean funding,throughtheItalianregionalprogramforintegratedsupporttoenterprises.

Gathering as much information as pos- towards the new electronic devices. For All the information extracted must then sible from the documents of our past is many historical documents, this be organized to facilitate storage, access essential to preserve our cultural her- involves capturing their appearance, as and retrieval. itage for future generations, especially well as mitigating distortions and degra- in an era when the documents are dations, in order to help human or auto- Depending on the type of document, the migrating from traditional supports matic readers to extract their content. first step is to choose the most accurate

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 19 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

Figure 1: Capturing pages from an ancient book: the Figure 2: A screenshot from the AMMIRA image manipulation user interface. AMMIRA DTA Chroma multispectral camera.

and detailed data capture modalities. can be attached (eg “main text”, “foot- These modalities include the acquisi- notes”, “images-graphics”, etc.). The tion geometry and the spatial and spec- software system that supports our tral ranges and resolutions. The imaging imaging system is capable of per- system that we have adopted consists of forming many of these tasks. First, we a high-resolution, multispectral, com- can spatially co-register the available puter-controlled camera with three vis- images, after correcting 2D or 3D geo- ible and two infrared channels, coupled metric distortions if necessary. This pro- with a visible-ultraviolet lighting vides us with a set of data maps with system and a structured-light projector precisely located pixels. Further pro- for 3D acquisition. Thus, depending on cessing includes virtual restoration, ie the importance and the state of preser- removal of distortions and interference vation of a document, we can represent (stains, blur, bleed-through), and extrac- it through panchromatic or colour tion of features and patterns. The latter images in the visible range, infrared task is accomplished through several reflectance or transmission images, and fully or partially automatic approaches, ultraviolet fluorescence images and, in based mainly on linear data models. some cases, a precise 3D shape. This flexibility of representation can help us The key to incorporating semantics into detect and isolate many kinds of hidden the processed data is to adopt an effi- features, and also account for geomet- cient metadata schema that traces all the rical distortions caused by deformations processing steps applied to any piece of of the document support. The 3D acqui- data and all its relationships to other sition augments the level of information stored material, including all the admin- Link: that we are able to preserve, because istrative and descriptive information AMMIRA homepage: deformations and degradations often needed and, eventually, enabling con- http://www.ammira.eu describe the history of a manuscript. So, tent-based retrieval from a large data the fruition of the digital replica of a repository. The parts classified as text Please contact: manuscript or an entire book acquires a can be translated into machine-readable Elena Console new dimension as these can be repre- form through automatic or semi-auto- TEA-SAS, Italy sented as a 3D object in the space. matic character recognition systems. E-mail : [email protected] The AMMIRA project began in However, all these features are still raw September 2009 and will be completed Anna Tonazzini data, ie a more or less detailed represen- in September 2011. The partners all ISTI-CNR, Italy tation of the document appearance with have a consolidated experience in this E-mail : [email protected] no semantics relating to it. The images field. The research is expected to con- must next be freed from interferences tinue in the future with the aim of Fabio Bruno and distortions, extracting all the fea- implementing a fully integrated hard- University of Calabria, Italy tures to which, at some level, semantics ware-software system. E-mail: [email protected]

20 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 Tangible Culture - Designing virtual Exhibitions on Multi-Touch Devices by Martin Hecher, Robert Möstl, Eva Eggeling, Christian Derler and Dieter W. Fellner

Culturalheritageinstitutionssuchasgalleries,museumsandlibrariesincreasinglyusedigital mediatopresentartifactstotheiraudienceandenablethemtoimmersethemselvesina culturalvirtualworld.WiththeapplicationeXhibition:editor3D,museumcuratorsandeditors haveasoftwaretoolathandtointeractivelyplanandvisualizeexhibitions.Thesoftwareis runningonstandardPCsaswellasmulti-touchdevices,whichallowausertoutilizeintuitive gesturesforpositioningexhibitionobjects.Furthermore,multi-touchtechnologyoffersthe integrationofcollaborativeworkintoadecisionmakingprocess.

In cultural heritage institutions, digital Communication Technologies of exhibits, the two-dimensional represen- content has gained increasing impor- JOANNEUM RESEARCH, is tailored tation of the virtual exhibition can be tance over recent years. The availability entirely to a curator’s needs and require- exported any time to a three-dimen- of scanned 3D objects, images or videos ments. Museums, galleries and other sional world, which offers an immersive of historical artifacts offers many advan- cultural heritage institutions can utilize impression. The integrated preview tages. Exhibits, which would be secured it for multiple purposes such as: comprises a realtime visualization of in an archive, can now be presented to a • the enrichment of existing exhibi- the virtual exhibition in 3D. wide audience. Furthermore, virtual arti- tions Additionally placed sound elements – facts cannot only be used to replace • the design and preview of upcoming such as a narrator or ambient music – existing objects, but also to complete exhibitions complete the virtual world. fragments or to show them in a state • archiving of temporary exhibitions never seen before. In digital form the • the creation of interactive 3D-presen- The traditional way of interaction with content of an exhibition can be visual- tations for multi-media terminals virtual exhibits uses the mouse pointer ized with highlights and enriched with • interactive catalogues or websites as input device. This paradigm of user information. These enriched digital arti- • advertising. interaction has changed. Multi-touch facts reach an audience all over the world technology is the interactive and intu- without replacing the real museum. As a The primary target for the development itive means of providing a new user consequence, it is a reasonable and sen- of the eXhibition:editor3D was user experience. In 2011, JOANNEUM sible extension to a museum visit and to friendliness and usability. As technical RESEARCH and Fraunhofer Austria the whole museum scene. details are hidden behind an intuitive joined forces to extend the capabilities interface, curators can fully concentrate of eXhibition:editor3D. Fraunhofer To bring the digital content into a pre- on realizing their ideas. The software Austria contributed its know-how on sentable form, an authoring tool is uses two-dimensional graphical user multi-touch devices. Now modern ges- needed. eXhibition:editor3D allows the interfaces and planning concepts based ture-based user interfaces help to design composition of content into a virtual on floor plans. Within these plans the exhibitions as easily as handling a museum. The eXhibition:editor3D author places exhibition objects virtu- mobile device or smart-phone: grab- application, developed by the Austrian ally by drag’n’drop techniques. Having bing, rotating and scaling of objects can Institute of Information and placed all 3D models, images and video be done with a fingertip. Another ben-

Figure 1: Moving objects with a fingertip (left), collaborative work on a single exhibition (middle), floor based GUI interface of the application eXhibition:editor3D (right).

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 21 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

efit of the multi-touch technology is the eXhibition:editor3D, namely the possi- Links: possibility to collaboratively work on a bility to design virtual exhibitions with http://www.exhibition3d.at single exhibition. Around a multi-touch a modern gesture input interface and http://www.fraunhofer.at/vc table, as shown in Figure 1, authors can instant visual feedback of the resulting http://www.joanneum.at jointly discuss ideas and simultaneously 3D scene. The combination of these two position and adjust exhibition artifacts. features provides exhibition editors a Please contact: The project cooperation between fast and flexible workflow for effi- Martin Hecher JOANNEUM RESEARCH and ciently designing virtual exhibitions Fraunhofer Austria Research GmbH Fraunhofer Austria got off to a good appropriate for a wide range of cultural Tel: +43 316 873 5410 start with two major enhancements of heritage themes. E-mail: [email protected]

vISITO Tuscany: Landmark Recognition for Cultural Heritage

by Giuseppe Amato, Fabrizio Falchi and Paolo Bolettieri

VISITOTuscany(VIsualSupporttoInteractiveTOurisminTuscany)isaresearchprojectwhich investigatestechniquesforproducinganinteractiveguide,accessibleviasmartphone,fortourists visitingcitiesofart.Thesystemappliesimageanalysisandcontentrecognitiontechniquesto recognizephotographedmonuments.Theuserjusthastotakeapictureofatouristlandmarkto obtainpertinentinformationonhisorhersmartphone.

In the last few years, the problem of rec- interaction based on 3D graphics. ognizing landmarks has received Information and experiences can be growing attention from the research shared with other users by creating community. As an example, Google pre- social networks. sented its approach to building a web- scale landmark recognition engine that One of the main novelties of VISITO was also used to implement the Google Tuscany, is the possibility of obtaining Goggles service [3]. VISITO Tuscany information about monuments by [1] also addresses this issue, investi- taking a picture of the tourist landmark gating and developing technologies in with a smartphone. The acquired order to produce an interactive and cus- image is analyzed and the landmark tomized advanced tour guide service to recognized so that the user can obtain visit Tuscan cities of art. More specifi- relevant information related to the cally, it focuses on offering services to monument. be used: • During the tour – through the use of The landmark recognition system is new generation mobile devices in composed of three main components: a order to improve the quality of the client application that runs on a mobile experience. The mobile device phone, an image classifier that recog- enables users to get detailed informa- nizes landmarks contained in pictures, tion about the artistic objects they are and a digital library containing looking at or about their location. descriptions of various monuments. At While taking pictures of monuments, Figure 1: Tourist information on a the moment of writing, we have cre- places and other close-up objects, the smartphone. ated recognizers for hundreds of mon- users indicate what appears to them to uments in three cities in Tuscany: be most interesting. When a picture is Florence, Pisa, and San Gimignano. taken it is processed by the system to ences , together with information The mobile application is already infer the user’s interests and to pro- already included in the database sys- available for the Android platform [2] vide relevant and customized infor- tem and, more generally, on the web, and will be soon available also for mation. For example, if a user takes a can be employed by users to better iPhone. When the user takes a picture picture of the bell tower of Giotto, plan their own visit. Interaction will of a monument, the picture is first sent they can get detailed information (his- take place through 3D graphic-based to the classifier that checks if one of torical, artistic, structural techniques, techniques. the available monuments is recog- etc) on this monument. • After the tour – to keep the memory nized. When a monument is recog- • Before the tour – to plan the visit in a alive and share it with others. The nized, the description is retrieved from better way. Information from other user can access the pictures taken and the digital library and sent back to the users of the system and their experi- the itinerary followed through an mobile device.

22 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 Figure 2: The VISITO Tuscany project services.

Landmark recognition is performed rather than similarity among whole with all authorizations to build the using local features and kNN based images. demonstrator. classification algorithms. We defined a new approach that relies on a revision The VISITO Tuscany project is funded Links: of the single label kNN classification by the Tuscan Region and is coordi- [1] http://www.visitotuscany.it . More specifically, we pro- nated by ISTI-CNR. The consortium [2] https://market.android.com/details? pose an algorithm that first assigns a includes three ISTI-CNR laboratories id=it.visitotuscany label to each local feature of an image (Networked Multimedia Information [3] http://www.google.com/mobile/ query. The label of the image is then Systems, Visual Computing and High goggles assigned on the basis of the labels and Performance Computing), the security confidences assigned to its local fea- laboratory of IIT-CNR, and three pri- Please contact: tures. In other words, our kNN vate companies: Alinari24Ore, Giuseppe Amato approach is based on the similarity Hyperborea, and 3Logic MK. We thank ISTI-CNR, Italy among the local features of the query the municipalities of Florence, Pisa, Tel: +39 050 3152810 image and the ones in the training set and San Gimignano for providing us E-mail: [email protected]

National Gallery in Prague by Stanislav Mikeš, Michal Haindl and Radek Holub

ScientistsatInstituteofInformationTheoryandAutomation(UTIA),AcademyofSciencesofthe CzechRepublichavedevelopedadetailedvirtualmodeloftheDepartmentofModernArtofthe NationalGalleryinPrague.Thisimpressiveseven-storeybuildingholdsthegallery’scollectionof contemporaryimages,drawingsandstatuesaswellasseveraltemporaryexhibitions.Thisvirtual modelservesasacomprehensive3Dinformationsystemwithnavigationsupportforvisitorsandas aninteractivetoolforexhibitiondesignersandcurators.Withinthecomfortoftheirownhome, visitorscanexperienceananimatedonlinethematicvisittotheirselectedworksofartandalso printamapwithaproposedpersonalizedroute.

While navigation in real world, ie travel- The proposed solution for navigation in the building interior and thus locally ling to a specific target location, often this huge gallery building, which has changes the navigation route structure. poses a challenging and only partially- seven exhibition floors and two large The optimal navigation route is auto- understood problem, especially in exhibition halls in the ground floor, is matically generated using graph algo- unknown environment, navigation in a based on the graph structure. One’s rithms and user defined constraints. For virtual reality (VR) environment is even actual position in a complex virtual example, we assume that a visitor will more difficult due to many missing real scene is depicted as a highlighted point never walk closer than half a metre to world cues. A major problem for users of in an overlaid transparent map of the the walls, will pass through each exit in virtual environments is maintaining building floor plan. This basic naviga- its centre and larger spaces are covered knowledge of their location and orienta- tion graph structure is constructed semi- with walking loops with a minimum tion while they move through the space automatically and it is subsequently diameter of one metre, etc. Each floor because perceptual judgements are locally changed by the exhibition editor plan is than supplemented with a preset biased within a virtual environment. which places new exhibition panels into route graph structure based on the basic

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 23 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

Figure 1: National Gallery in Prague virtual model.

building structure. Single corridors, lifts exhibitions proposals. The editor loads needed to walk a specified route in the and staircases are represented as graph a requested floor plan and allows inser- real National Gallery of Prague as well edges, while doors, branching or tion of single exhibition panels and as the time needed for an exhibition turning points are graph vertices. This specification of their parameters such as sightseeing tour. This navigation route initial graph structure which represents single dimensions, colour and covering is subsequently used for generation of initialization of navigation routes can be material. Single paintings from the a movie that represents the virtual generated semi-automatically based on gallery database are subsequently set walkthrough. This walkthrough can be the floor plans. Narrow corridors have out on these exhibition panels and other demonstrated using avatars or simu- single graph edges while wider corri- supplementary data can be attached, for lating the viewpoint of a visitor. Visitors dors or halls can have several graph example information about a painter in can watch not only an animated the- loops. This automatically proposed the corresponding pop-up window. matic visit to their selected works of art graph structure (primary graph) can be When the exhibition editing is ready, it from home over internet, but also print a interactively edited using the exhibition is exported into the VRML building map with a proposed personalized editor. Superfluous edges or vertices model and can be immediately checked route. It is also possible to print the can be removed while new edges and in the browser either walking around or floor plan with the suggested route vertices can be added. Single edges or in the generated walk-through movies. highlighted. If disabled or wheel chair vertices can also be shifted to other access is required, the generated route positions and vertices can be supple- Generation of a path based on parame- will avoid staircases, instead taking a mented with additional attributes such ters provided by the user is performed slightly longer route via the lift. as emergency exits, lifts, staircases and automatically in a module that con- doors. siders the ground plan of a 3D scene as a labelled graph. The labels represent Please contact: The virtual National Gallery model various kinds of information such as Stanislav Mikeš allows virtual exhibitions to be built accessibility of a particular location for UTIA ASCR - CRCIM, Czech interactively using our exhibition editor. disabled people. Single edge attribute Republic The editor was devised for exhibition also encompasses physical length, thus Tel: +420 266052262 architects to support and speed up their it is possible to estimate the real time E-mail: @utia.cas.cz

Figure 2: Selected navigation frames (2,5,11,25 top, 27,32,38,42 bottom) around a virtual exhibition.

24 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 Macedonia: from fragments to Pixels by Xenophon Zabulis, Dimitrios Grammenos, Antonis A. Argyros, Dimitrios Sifakis and Constantine Stephanidis

Forgetallaboutthetraditional"DoNotTouch"museumrule!In2010,theInstituteofComputer ScienceoftheFoundationforResearchandTechnology–Hellas(ICS-FORTH)andthe ArchaeologicalMuseumofThessaloniki(AMTh)collaboratedinthecreationofaspecialexhibition ofprototypicalinteractivesystemswithsubjectsdrawnfromancientMacedonia,named "Macedoniafromfragmentstopixels"(seelinkbelow).TheexhibitionishostedbytheAMThatits premisesandisopentothegeneralpublic.

The exhibition comprises seven interac- Athanasios near Thessaloniki depict- 5. Multimodal Diverse Travel compris- tive systems which are based on some of ing a symposium. The tomb is not es a table, whose surface is covered the research outcomes of the Ambient open to visitors, so Polyapton pro- by a printed map on which the loca- Intelligence Programme of ICS- vides a rare opportunity to enjoy it. tion of various cities and other FORTH. The digital content of these The multi-touch screen recognizes notable sites is projected. White systems includes objects from the the touch of many fingers or hands, paper tablets with a coloured frame Museum’s permanent collection and but also specific objects, at the same are at the visitors’ disposal. When the other objects related to Macedonia. In time. Visitors can ‘scroll’ across the magnifying glass is placed over a brief, the interactive systems are: painting and focus on points of inter- city, related images, videos and texts 1. Panoptes, a digital exhibition-cata- est with multimedia information by appear on the tablet. For every city logue system which allows visitors to touching them, zoom in on details there are multiple information browse its content and examine with the use of a paper magnifying “pages”, which can be viewed by details of images, read accompanying lens, while an infrared torch displays touching virtual buttons at the bottom texts and follow threads of informa- a modern rendition of the painting. of the tablet. tion. A children’s windmill is located between two touch screens. Blowing Figure 1: Two young visitors on the windmill, the largest collection exploring multiple layers of of gold wreaths in the world unfolds information in the electronic before the visitor. By pausing on any reproduction of a wall painting image, additional information is pro- with Polyapton. Besides a finger vided on about the wreath and its touch, the system is sensitive to symbolisms. the touch of particular objects 2. Cryptolexon, the hidden crossword, is with different functionalities. a game loved by all ages, which com- bines entertainment with education. The names of ancient gods and heroes are hidden within a matrix of letters for the visitors to discover. Figure 2: The Minister of Culture 3. Peridexion offers museum visitors the and Tourism of Greece explores possibility of exploring an object locations of archaeological and/or a subject in depth. In this par- interest in Multimodal Diverse ticular case, the subject is a master- Travel. As the users move piece of 6th c. BC Athenian black-fig- rectangular pieces of paper on ured pottery, known as the Crater of the map, location-based, Lydos, which portrays the legend of interactive multimedia content the hunt of a monstrous boar in Caly- appears on them. donia, Aetolia. The system has a touch screen that presents a view of an object at a time. Visitors can select the object or the view they wish to see Figure 3: Macrographia presents and then discover points of interest a large artifact in actual size and and relative multimedia information, updates visual content based on or zoom in on any detail at will. the location and walkthrough 4. Polyapton, a large interactive screen trajectories of visitors. that can be used by several visitors who all wish to explore simultaneous- ly multifaceted information on a sub- ject. It presents one of the best-pre- served ancient Greek paintings, from the Macedonian tomb of Agios

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 25 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

6. One day in a farmstead allows the tions, which correspond to the prey of pieces. Rare and fragile artifacts are public to visit an ancient farmstead the hunters. When someone stands in now at the public’s fingertips with the that has been excavated at Asproval- front of a section, depending on the use of modern and user friendly tech- ta, near Thessaloniki, by enriching distance from the screen, the image nology. All systems are multilingual with multimedia information a scale she/he views and the caption under- and support interaction by one or mul- model realized by the AMTh. By neath change. There are four levels of tiple visitors. moving a white paper tablet over the information: the present state of the areas of the farmstead, the visitor can painting, an artist’s sketch, an artist’s This work was supported by the view and learn more about the exca- modern rendition, and notable “Ambient Intelligence Programme” of vation findings and gain details on details. ICS-FORTH. ancient rural life. 7. Macrographia is a system that pres- The exhibition is very different from an ents very large images, which visitors archaeological exhibition, as the public Link: can explore by walking around in a can have a novel relationship with [1] Macedonia: from fragments to room. One of the walls of this room exceptional artifacts of the past through pixels, 2010: comprises the projection screen. The the use of new technologies, enjoying http://www.makedonopixels.org projection of content on the screen an interactive experience that combines depends on the location of each visi- information and learning with entertain- Please contact: tor in the room. Visitors enter the ment. In this way, visitors have the Constantine Stephanidis room and the system follows the opportunity to approach classical antiq- ICS-FORTH, Greece movement of each one separately. uity in a novel manner: by exploring Tel. : +30 2810 391741 The painting is divided into five sec- digital reproductions of ancient master- E-mail: [email protected]

Discovering Knowledge from Sumerian Economic Documents

by Wojciech Jaworski

A vast amount of knowledge is contained in large collections of unstructured or weakly structured text documents, which started to emerge soon after the discovery of writing. We develop a methodology, which allows users to seek not only for information localized in specific documents but also knowledge spread across an entire document collection.

Our recent research has focused on the Latin transliteration (ie documents are Sumer. The corpus contains crucial Sumerian Economic Text Corpus from represented using Latin alphabet and information about economic, social and the Ur III period. Sumerians lived from each cuneiform sign is replaced by its political history of the state, as well as prehistoric times until late 3rd millen- reading). For our studies, we have its political system and administration nium BC in lower Mesopotamia (modern selected a subcorpus of 11 891 docu- structure. Sources of this type provide Iraq). Sumer was the first highly devel- ments concerning distribution of the most complete information about oped urban civilization, which used domestic animals. This subcorpus con- the daily life of those days. cuneiform script. During the reign of the sists of circa 850 000 Sumerian signs, 3rd dynasty of Ur (2100 BC-2000 BC), each representing either a word or a Owing to the large number of docu- whose power extended as far as present syllable. ments, the task of finding relevant ones Iraq and western Iran, the state intro- is intractable for human readers. On the duced a centrally planned economy with Figure 1 presents the contents of a typ- other hand classical information an extensive bureaucratic structure. ical Sumerian document. This docu- retrieval techniques fail when con- ment reports the transfer of lambs from fronted with the Sumerian language. Civil servants used clay tablets to record three people to ab-ba-sa6-ga, an official Our search engine, dedicated to data about agriculture and factory pro- of the Ur III state. The transfer took Sumerian Economic documents, offers duction, worker salaries, summaries of place on the 23rd day of the month sze- a solution to these problems. However, executed work, distribution of com- kin-ku5 in the year when the high priest vital information is spread across a vast modities, goods and animals, lists of of goddess Innana was elevated to number of simple documents. In order sacrificed animals, travel diets and other office. The third verse of the document to extract it we must process document economical information. is ambiguous. We cannot determine contents into computer understandable whether ga is a part of a name or a part format. Archaeologists have excavated about of an animal description. 100 000 tablets from this period. A We take advantage of the fact that the corpus of over 45 000 tablets is avail- Economic documents are an essential Ur III Economic Text Corpus has able electronically, stored in the form of source of information about ancient restricted subject-matter which allows

26 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 Figure 1: An example of transliterated cuneiform tablet from UR III.

Figure 2: Animal flows between the officials in UR III Kingdom.

us to represent the structure of informa- mine relationships between Sumerian • reconstruction of broken documents tion enclosed in documents by means of officials in terms of number of animals and determining contents of missing ontology. This ontology represents the that were transferred between them. We ones. domain knowledge: it splits the set of represent this information in terms of objects described in documents into cat- the graph of animal flow. Vertices of the We also develop a query language that egories (types) and it determines rela- graph represent officials. Graph edge allows us to retrieve information tionships between these categories. width is proportional to the number of according to semantic patterns. animals transferred between individ- We process documents by means of a uals. In figure 2, we present a fragment In future we plan to pursue the ultimate grammar which describes the way in of the animal flow graph. We selected goal of creating a model of the which phrases are constructed from edges labelled with animal quantities Sumerian economy. words and other simpler phrases. We greater than 900. The complete graph assume that syntactic operations con- that encloses all extracted transactions structing compound phrases on the has 2754 vertices and 5275 edges. basis of simpler ones correspond to the Links: presentation of complex objects by Among other possible applications of http://www.ur3.historia.uw.edu.pl means of their components. As a result our knowledge base we explored: http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~wjaworski of parsing we obtain a logical formula • observation of seasonal economic which represents the contents of the fluctuations as well as macro-eco- Please contact: document. nomic changes that happened during Wojciech Jaworski The content of all documents consti- the Ur III period; Institute of Informatics, University of tutes a vast knowledge base of • detection documents that describe the Warsaw, Poland Sumerian economy. We use it to deter- same object or event; E-mail: [email protected]

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 27 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

Multimodal Computer-Assisted Transcription of Ancient Documents

by Verónica Romero, Alejandro Héctor Toselli, Enrqiue Vidal, Elsa Cubel and Joan Andreu Sánchez

Amultimodalinteractiveapproachfortranscriptionofancientdocumentsisproposed.Inthis approach,user’sfeedbackdirectlyfacilitatesimprovementstosystemaccuracywhilemultimodality increasessystemergonomyanduseracceptability.

Huge historical document collections Given the kind of (typically hand- Assisted Transcription of Text Images - residing in libraries, museums and written) text images involved in ancient MM-CATTI), the user is directly archives are currently being digitalized (or even more recent historic) docu- involved in the transcription process, in for preservation purposes and to make ments, state-of-the-art Handwritten which following a preset protocol, them available worldwide through large Text Recognition (HTR) technology is he/she validates and/or corrects the on-line digital libraries.The number of very far from offering useful solutions HTR output during the process. The these on-line digital libraries is dramati- to the transcription problem and heavy protocol that rules this interaction cally increasing. This is in part due to the human intervention is often required to process is formulated in the following steps: The HTR system proposes a full transcription of the input handwritten text line image. Then, the user validates the longest prefix of the transcription which is error-free and enters some on- line touch-screen pen-strokes and/or some amendment keystrokes to correct the first error in the suffix. An on-line HTR feedback subsystem (or HFR) is used to decode this input. In this way, a new extended consolidated prefix is produced based on the previous vali- dated prefix, the on-line decoding word and the keystroke amendments. Using this new prefix, the HTR suggests a suitable continuation of it. These pre- vious steps are iterated until a final, per- fect transcription is produced. Figure 1: Using the MM-CATTI system with a touch-screen. MM-CATTI is shown to work quite well by an implemented Web-based ever-decreasing costs of digital storage check and correct the results. This post- Demo (http://cat.iti.upv.es/iht/). Figure devices and to recent advances in image editing process is both inefficient and 1 shows a user interacting with the MM- digitalization and processing technolo- inconvenient to the user. CATTI system by means of a touch- gies. Thanks to these advances, hun- screen. The on-line form of such MM- dreds of terabytes worth of ancient doc- As an alternative to fully manual tran- CATTI system allows collaborative ument digital images have been col- scription and post-editing, a multimodal tasks with thousands of users across the lected and can be easly made available interactive approach is proposed here globe to be carried out, thus reducing to the historians and the public alike. where user feedback is provided by notably the overall image recognition However, such huge amounts of data are means of touch-screen pen strokes process. Since the users operate within a only of very limited use in their present and/or more traditional keyboard and web browser window, the system also raw digital image form and current mouse operation. User’s feedback provides cross-platform compatibility efforts focus on technologies aimed at directly facilitates improvements in and requires no disk space on the client reducing the human effort required for system accuracy, while multimodality machine. the annotation of the raw images with increases system ergonomy and user informative content. In the case of text acceptability. Multimodal interaction is To test the effectiveness of the MM- images, which are among the most approached in such a way that both the CATTI approach, experiments were numerous and interesting, the most main and the feedback data streams carried out on several corpora corre- informative annotation level is their help each other to optimize overall per- sponding to different handwritten text (palaeographic) transcription into an formance and usability. transcription tasks. From the reported adequate textual electronic format that results on these corpora and assuming would provide new ways of indexing, In this new multimodal interactive for simplicity that the cost of correcting consulting and querying these docu- approach for transcription of text an on-line decoding error is just similar ments. images (Multimodal Computer- to that of another on-line touch-screen

28 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 interaction, the estimated human effort This multimodal interactive paradigm establishes a five-year research pro- to produce error-free transcription using has been proposed by the Pattern gramme to develop pattern recognition MM-CATTI is reduced by as much as Recognition and Human Language approaches that explicitly deal with the 15% on average, regarding to the clas- Technology (PRHLT) group from the challenges and opportunities entailed sical HTR system. In other words, from Universidad Politécnica de Valencia by the human-interaction paradigm. every 100 words misrecognized by a (UPV). PRHLT is currently involved in conventional HTR system, a human the use of interactive techniques for Please contact: post-editor will have to correct all the machine translation and transcription Joan Andreu Sánchez 100 erroneous words, while a MM- through the large-budget MIPRCV Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, CATTI user would correct only 85 – the Spanish project (http://miprcv.iti.es). Spain other 15 are corrected automatically by The MIPRCV project is leaded by the Tel: +34 963877253 the MM-CATTI system. PRHLT research group. MIPRCV E-mail: [email protected]

Reducing OCR Errors in Gothic-Script Documents by Lenz Furrer and Martin Volk

Inordertoimproveopticalcharacterrecognition(OCR)qualityintextsoriginallytypesetinGothicscript, anautomaticcorrectionsystemcanbebuilttobehighlyspecializedforthegiventext.Theapproach includesexternaldictionaryresourcesaswellasinformationderivedfromthetextitself.

The resolutions by the Zurich Cantonal data (such as the date or the archival sig- ‘Dr.’), their diverting character is some- Government from 1887 to 1902 are nature) as well as improving the text times not recognized. This leads to badly archived as printed volumes in the State quality by automatically correcting misrecognized words due to the quite Archive of Zurich. The documents are OCR errors. From an OCR perspective, different shapes of the typefaces; for typeset in Gothic script, also known as the data are most challenging, as the example antiqua ‘Landrecht’ (Engl.: cit- blackletter or Fraktur. As part of a col- texts contain not only Gothic type letters izenship) is rendered as completely laborative project between the State – which lead to a lower accuracy com- illegible ‘I>aii

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 29 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

encountered in modern dictionaries (eg form of ‘gehen’, Engl.: to go, or In an evaluation the approach has historic ‘Mittheilung’ versus modern ‘Niederdruckdampfsystem’, a com- shown promising results. The text ‘Mitteilung’, Engl.: message). This pound of four segments meaning low- quality in terms of word accuracy could means that using modern dictionary pressure steam system), a list of local be improved from 96.96 % to 97.73 %, resources directly, cannot lead to satis- toponyms, the recognition confidence which is equivalent to a 25 % reduction factory results. Additionally, the gov- values of the OCR engine and more. in the rate of word misrecognition. As ernmental resolutions typically contain Every word is either judged as correct the system is far from complete, con- many toponymical references, which or erroneous according to the informa- siderably improved results can be are not covered by general-vocabulary tion we gather from the various expected. dictionaries. Regional peculiarities are resources. The historic and regional also evident, for instance pronunciation spelling deviations are modelled with a With this project we demonstrate that it variants or words not common else- set of handwritten rules describing the is possible to build a highly specialized where in the German speaking areas (eg regular differences. For example, with a correction system for a specific text col- ‘Hülfstrupp’ versus the standard rule stating that the sequence ‘th’ corre- lection. We are using both general and German ‘Hilfstruppe’, Engl.: rescue sponds to ‘t’ in modern spelling, the specific resources, while the approach team), and of course there is a great standard form ‘Mitteilung’ can be as a whole is widely generalizable. We amount of genre-specific vocabulary, ie derived from old ‘Mittheilung’. While see our work as an auspicious method administrative and legal jargon. We are the latter word is not found in the dic- for improving text quality of historic hence challenged to build a fully-auto- tionary, the derived one is, which allows OCR-converted text. matic correction system with high pre- for the assumption that ‘Mittheilung’ is cision that is aware of historic spelling a correctly spelled word. and regional variants and contains geo- Link: graphical and governmental language. The set of all words recognized as cor- http://www.cl.uzh.ch/research/digitalisi rect words and their frequency can now erungunderschliessung/digitalisierung The core task of the desired correction serve as a lexicon for correcting erro- UndAuszeichnungDerZuercherRegieru system with respect to its precision is neous word tokens. This corpus-derived ngsratsbeschluesse_en.html the categorization routine that deter- lexicon is naturally highly genre-spe- mines the correctness of every word. cific, which is desirable. On the other Please conact: For example, ‘saumselig’ (Engl.: dila- hand, rare words are likely to occur only Lenz Furrer tory) is a correct word, whereas in a misspelled version, in which case University of Zurich, Switzerland ‘Gefundheit’ is not (in fact, it is misrec- there will be no correction candidate in Tel: +41 44 635 67 38 ognized for ‘Gesundheit’, Engl.: the lexicon. Due to the repetitive char- E-mail: [email protected] health). We use a combination of var- acter of the text’s topic there is also a lot ious resources for this task, such as a of repetition in the vocabulary across the Martin Volk large dictionary system for German that corpus. This increases the chance that a University of Zurich, Switzerland covers morphological variation and word misrecognized in one place will Tel: +41 44 635 43 17 compounding (such as ‘ging’, a past have a correct occurrence in another. E-mail: [email protected]

Deciphering the Story of the Museum

by Eoin Kilfeather

Culturalmeaningdoesnotresideinindividualobjectsbutinthepatternsofknowledgeandevents, beliefandthoughtthatlinkthemtoeachotherandtotheobserver.Thisiswhynarrativeisso importanttothecommunicationof,andmeaningfulunderstanding,ofculture.

Digital heritage and semantic web tech- tives are not static, but change in time Although there is a vast and growing nologies have held out the promise of and in relation to the viewpoints from store of digital objects, most of them do nearly unlimited access to cultural which they are both created and not provide the information for explicit knowledge. However, the vision is as explored. Curators have developed interpretation. On the other hand many beguiling – and currently as unobtain- ways of presenting their collections cultural websites are extensive and ele- able – as the invocation in John that guide visitors and make sense of gant, but their narratives are ‘burnt-in’ Donne’s Song (see Figure 1). The the experience. Although we have new and fixed by their authors: they can problem is that cultural meaning does ways of accessing cultural objects, the never be complete, and there is a good not reside in individual objects (how- narrative structures and arguments that chance that the searcher’s interests will ever beautiful and marvellous in them- could be found in a handcrafted pres- not be fully met. Also, current systems selves) but in the patterns of knowledge entation are often lost. There is a ten- are tied to the technology platforms for and events, belief and thought that link sion between providing user control which they are authored. Web-based them to each other and to the observer. over what is shown and the coherence approaches offer a two dimensional sen- It is well understood that cultural narra- of the overall experience. sory experience that is limited in com-

30 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 Figure 1 (top): A Donne’ poem.

Figure 2 (left): A mock-up of a visualization.

parison with the real world; immersive Technology (IE), the Open University’s machine representation becomes richer and haptic systems still require expen- Knowledge Media Institute (UK), and and more powerful. This will make it sive special-purpose hardware, whose Brno University of Technology (CZ) possible to see if there are relevant tran- use is restricted to small numbers of expert in knowledge management, nar- sitions or regions in other people’s nar- people at the heritage sites themselves. rative construction, , ratives, thereby enabling social interpre- semantic web technologies, language tations and recommendations. It will The DECIPHER project proposes new technologies, multimodal interfaces and also support counterfactual or ‘what if’ solutions to the whole range of narrative digital heritage applications. reasoning by showing the effect of construction, knowledge visualization moving or removing a transition. and display problems. It will combine Background work carried out by KMi much richer, event-based metadata with has succeeded in uncovering interesting Clearly, it is not enough to develop a causal reasoning models. This will patterns from data by using a combina- narrative: we must present it in a way result in a reasoning engine, virtual tion of machine reasoning, knowledge that allows the visitor to explore the environment and interfaces that can visualization and user tagging. DECI- knowledge space and objects in the present digital heritage objects as part PHER will produce an advance in the richest way possible, by taking full of a coherent narrative, directly related process by combining much richer, advantage of whatever technology plat- to individual searches and user con- event-based metadata with causal and form is available (fixed or mobile, 2D texts. This will allow the user to interac- dynamic reasoning models. We will do or 3D, window or immersive). The tively assemble, visualize and explore, this by associating an object with a set visual formalisms, interfaces and inter- not just collections of objects, but the of events, making it possible to apply action techniques draw on DIT’s pre- knowledge structures that connect and machine reasoning in a much more vious work in mobile interaction and give them meaning. interesting way, not only to identify virtual museum spaces. Customised clusters of events or objects but also to rich interfaces support digital curation The partners bring together the skills construct narratives. in other ways. For example, some and experience in the technical fields installation art consists of a digital file required by the project, with the autho- To do this we need to generate the event- and the curatorial instructions for “how rial and curatorial authority of national based metadata. In this project, col- to show it.” Such a system that links institutions, the innovative impetus of a leagues in Brno University of media resources, curatorial metadata technology-based SME, and the drive to Technology are producing the event- and multi-modal interfaces would allow market of a large company that com- based semantic metadata automatically a much deeper exploration of such bines heritage and media interests. They from networked sources and the traces works. are: 1) Two national heritage institu- of social interaction. Artificial intelli- tions, the National Gallery of Ireland gence techniques, using Kripke struc- The DECIPHER project (FP7-270001- and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, tures (a type of nondeterministic finite Decipher) began in January 2011 and with major collections that span the state machine proposed by Saul Kripke runs for three years. It is supported by range of physical and born in 1963 to represent the behaviour of a the EU’s 7th Framework Programme. works. 2) A large company, Alinari 24 system )and Kripke semantics (a formal Ore (IT), which is both the world’s semantics for non-classical logic sys- oldest photographic archive and a part of tems, also known as relational semantics Link: a large, modern media group. 3) A or frame semantics) then make it pos- http://decipher-research.eu/ research-based SME System Simulation sible to identify and formally represent Ltd. (UK), specialising in software for regions and tipping points in sets of con- Please contact: professional media and content manage- tent and related events. By maintaining Eoin Kilfeather ment. 4) Three leading academic and accruing the metadata associated Digital Media Centre, Dublin, Ireland research centres, Dublin Institute of with the objects and transitions, the E-mail: [email protected]

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 31 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

Non-linear Digital Storytelling for the Battleship “G. Averof”

by Ralf Klamma and Yiwei Cao

Digitalmultimedia,webandmobiletechnologiesbringnewexperiencestomuseumsandcultural heritagemanagement.WithintheGerman-Greekprojectofnon-lineardigitalstorytellingforthe battleship“G.Averof”,advancedstorytellingapproacheswereappliedtothemuseumwithalarge multimediaarchiveonthehistoricbattleship.

The battleship “G. Averof” is the world’s archives for a new generation of A group of research assistants and from only surviving heavily armoured cruiser museum visitors used to web and mobile Aachen visited Harokopio University in of the early 20th century and serves as a technologies. With our advanced web- November 2009 to document the cul- museum operated by the Greek Navy in based storytelling environment “Virtual tural heritage for future projects. We did Faliron today. Non-linear digital story- Campfire” we were able to reuse the a 3D laser scanning campaign with the telling for the battleship “G. Averof” was large multimedia collection about the Riegl LMS-Z390i 3D scanner with over an interdisciplinary research project battleship “G. Averof” as well as to trace 20 scans from different viewpoints and between the Chair of Information the journeys of the flagship through time created the only 3D digital model of the Systems and Databases at RWTH and space by the utilization of digital “G. Averof”. Aachen University, Aachen, Germany map technologies. Moreover, we created and Harokopio University, Athens, a Web 2.0 community around the tradi- The story of the battleship “G. Averof” Greece. Starting from 2009, this project tional media where visitors can add their continues. Interdisciplinary cooperation was supported by the IKYDA program, own media and stories, thus creating enhances the applicability of research an integrated action program between new perspectives on the daily life on a methods in cultural heritage manage- the German Academic Exchange battleship. To stimulate this, we created ment. Upon request of the Culture Service (DAAD) and the Greek State multimedia stories documenting the coal Section of the German Foreign Office Scholarship Foundation (I.K.Y). The loading process for the ship as well as an evaluation of the historic city walls Greek partners contributed their the battle of Lemnos. The stories could of Ghazni in Afghanistan, the future expertise in geographic information sys- be consumed and refined in every web Islamic Culture Capital in 2013, has tems and cultural heritage while the browser but also on mobile smart recently been conducted by cultural her- German partners provided their experi- phones. itage experts from the RWTH Aachen ence in multimedia information systems Center of Documentation and design. Matthias Jarke, Ralf Klamma, Mobile Campfire, the mobile version of Conservation. All these activities have Yiwei Cao as well as a number of Virtual Campfire has been launched on addressed new community require- research assistants and students visited iTunes App Store. Mobile Campfire ments for Virtual Campfire and are now Harokopio University, while Emmanuel enables user communities to create, under consideration, such as cloud Stefanakis, Eleni Gadolou and Haroula annotate, search, and share photos and based video processing for cultural Papadaki visited RWTH Aachen multimedia stories on iPhone, iPod and sites. In such environments, the docu- University to exchange knowledge in a iPad. Mobile Campfire extends the mentation often has to be performed couple of workshops. semantic-enhanced video annotation with cheap and available hardware. service for Virtual Campfire to enable Processing costs and time of multi- The research project aimed at the promo- collaborative tagging of videos and media documents can be dramatically tion and enrichment of the museum photos. improved by using modern processing paradigm like cloud computing.

Links: http://dbis.rwth-aachen.de/cms/ projects/IKYDA http://dbis.rwth-aachen.de/cms/ projects/virtualCampfire http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/mobile- campfire/id365323266?mt=8

Please contact: Ralf Klamma RWTH Aachen University, Germany E-mail: “G. Averof” Battleship. [email protected]

32 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 YUMA – Crowd Sourced Metadata Enrichment for Online Collections by Joachim Jung, Rainer Simon and Bernhard Haslhofer

Annotationshavebeenameansofscholarlycommunicationandaninvaluableresearchtoolfor centuries.TheOpenSourceYUMAUniversalMediaAnnotatortakesthisparadigmandmakesit availableforthecollaborativeannotationofonlinemediaresources.TheYUMAsuiteoftoolscan currentlybeusedforimage,map,audioandvideoannotation.Itisdesignedtobeintegratedintoany hostenvironment(likeadigitallibraryportaloranonlinemediacollection)andenablesmash-ups acrosssuchenvironmentsbyexposingannotationdataaccordingtotheLinkedDataprinciples. LinkedDataisalsothebasisforoneofYUMA’suniquefeatures:SemanticTagging.Asemi-automatic mechanismprovidesuserswithtagsuggestionsthatcanbeusedtoeffortlesslyaugmentannotations withstructuredcontextinformation,egaboutplaces,personsofinterestorhistoricalperiods.

Major memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums, or audio and video collections) have, over the last 2-3 decades, made substantial efforts to bring their collections closer to their users. These efforts have had two strands: (i) the digitization of original collections (like books or administrative records) and (ii) the start of new, “born- digital” collections. While these collec- tions are now often accessible to the public via the , tools that support actual research – scholarly analysis, annotation, and communica- tion – have been scarce. The YUMA Universal Media Annotator (YUMA) aims to provide some of these tools. Figure 1: YUMA map annotation screenshot.

YUMA is an Open Source suite of browser-based applications that allow YUMA is based on a distributed archi- cific parts of an item: shape drawing for users to annotate different types of media tecture. It is designed to be integrated images or maps, or time range selection content. It is being developed by the into a host environment – eg an online for audio and video material. The map Digital Memory Engineering (DME) library portal – and lacks typical portal annotation tool (Figure 1) includes a research group of the AIT Austrian features like user management. Instead special interface with panning and Institute of Technology in cooperation it foresees appropriate and authen- zooming functionality (think Google with the Research Group Multimedia tication mechanisms which allow the Maps), and a set of geographical fea- Information Systems at the University of host environment to use YUMA as an tures such as map geo-referencing and Vienna. The system has seen a number of external, loosely-coupled service. The overlay. iterations since 2004 when a first proof system consists of two core elements: of concept was developed as part of the the Annotation Suite, an extendable set YUMA introduces a novel semi-auto- BRICKS (Building Resources for of browser-based end-user tools for matic Semantic Tagging approach that Integrated Cultural Knowledge Services) annotating content of specific media lets users make their annotation seman- EU project. It has seen further work in types (currently digital image, audio tically more expressive by adding links TELplus, a project of ‘The European and video files, as well as digitized to relevant ‘Linked Data’ resources. To Library’, the common portal of Europe's maps); and the Annotation Server, a support users in this task, the tool auto- national libraries. The current system common “backend" service used by all matically generates suggestions based represents a complete overhaul both in of those tools. on an analysis of the annotation text terms of the technology and the user (and the selected geographic area of a interface. It is currently being developed The Annotation Suite offers similar map) and pre-configured Linked Data further as part of the EuropeanaConnect functionality across all supported media sets (eg DBpedia and Geonames). best practice network, which will run types: users can create new annotations, Suggestions are presented in the form of until October 2011. EuropeanaConnect view or reply to existing ones and keep a tag cloud ( Figure1) from which the is one of the projects set up to build track of discussions around individual user can add proposed links to their Europeana, the portal that aims to give items or particular annotations via RSS annotation. Relevant properties of added access to Europe’s museums, libraries, feeds. Each tool provides appropriate resources are stored as part of the anno- archives and audio-visual collections. selection features for annotating spe- tation metadata: eg alternative language

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 33 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

labels, spelling variants or geo-coordi- Besides further development of BRICKS: nates. The thus enriched metadata can YUMA’s feature set and user interface, http://www.brickscommunity.org/ later be exploited in the portal to enable future work primarily addresses system TELplus: advanced search functionality, eg search evaluation. We currently investigate the http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/port in multiple languages, search by syn- effect that structured metadata gener- al/organisation/cooperation/telplus/ onymous names, or geographical search. ated collaboratively by users through The European Library: Semantic Tagging has on search & http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/ The Annotation Server is the storage retrieval. For that purpose, we have cre- EuropeanaConnect: and administration backend of the ated the COMPASS Map Labeller, an http://europeanaconnect.eu YUMA Annotation Framework. It can online portal used for the study of a map Europeana: http://europeana.eu/ be deployed with different relational annotation use case. A first outcome of Linked Data: http://linkeddata.org/ database systems (such as MySQL or this effort will be a ‘ground truth’ for the OAC: PostgreSQL). The different applications evaluation of map search engines. In a http://www.openannotation.org/spec in the Suite access, store, update, and second phase, this ground truth will be COMPASS Map Labeler: delete annotations through a REST API. used to carry out precision and recall http://compass.cs.univie.ac.at/ The Server also offers search (through a analyses on an annotated map collec- GUI as well as through an API) and tion. The analysis will help to quantify basic administration features, and pro- the improvement that is gained in terms Please contact: vides the infrastructure for the RSS feed of the quality of obtained search results, Joachim Jung, Rainer Simon syndication. The server, in turn, can also when search is performed on metadata AIT Austrian Institute of Technology / act as a Linked Data resource itself: it enriched by Semantic Tags vs. on tradi- AARIT exposes annotations with unique URIs, tional metadata only. E-mail: [email protected], which return an RDF representation [email protected] when resolved. To provide data interop- Links: erability, the tool relies on the OAC YUMA: Demonstration: Bernhard Haslhofer model, an emerging ontology for http://dme.ait.ac.at/annotation, source Cornell University, USA describing scholarly annotations of YUMA code: E-mail: Web-accessible information. http://github.com/yuma-annotation [email protected]

Tidy City: Learning about Cultural Heritage through a User-Created Mobile Game

by Richard Wetzel

Tidy City is a location-based scavenger hunt game for Android phones which allows everybody to create and publish their own content. During the game, players have to solve riddles that deal with historic or current topics and elements of the city. This enables players to learn about the past and present while exploring the city.

The game starts with the riddles scat- around the city with their eyes open to and walks around the city in order to get tered around in the environment which come up with the solution. inspiration, take photos and record GPS the players can see on a map view on the positions. This data can then be mobile phone. They now need to walk When the players think they are uploaded to the server where it can be over to the riddle in order to collect it. standing at the correct location (evalu- accessed from a web interface. Here, This enables them to read a short ated by GPS), they can try to solve the the riddles can be structured and filled description and see a photo. From this riddle, and if they do so they earn with more detail. If the user is happy information the players have to figure points. When players solve a riddle a with the result, the mission can be pub- out two things: new description and image for the lished and becomes available for all riddle become available which give the players of Tidy City. 1) What is the object in question? players further information about the 2) Where is this object located in reality? riddle that they just solved. When the Together with the newspaper publisher players have collected and solved all in Waiblingen, Germany, (ZVW), Tidy The subjects of the riddles might include riddles of a given mission, they have City was staged for local families in statues and monuments, architecturally won the scenario. March 2011. The mission for this event interesting buildings, historical sites or was created with the help of four local anything else conceived of by the mis- Creating a new mission for Tidy City is kids, aged 10 to 12, who, under guid- sion creator. Sometimes the solution to a an easy process, consisting of two steps. ance, used the authoring tools to create riddle is very simple; often however, the At first, the mission author uses the engaging riddles about their home players need to think hard and walk Tidy City Scout app for Android phones town. In this case the riddles included,

34 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 for instance, questions about the typical design for Tidy City was conceived by chimera that are found on some of the Michael Straeubig of i3Games. The houses in the old town, an art piece on goal of the project is to provide a flex- the main square, the medieval clock ible and powerful framework for the tower of the city hall and a historic creation of mobile games, fountain. ranging from experienced users to novices. The TOTEM software consists Creating new missions for Tidy City is of several mobile and web-based appli- an interesting way to promote cultural cations that provide the necessary infra- heritage. As a mobile game that is structure for the creation of such games. played outdoors, it gets the players Furthermore, a variety of such games is directly to the relevant areas of the city being created during the course of the and motivates the exploration of the project to be evaluated and analyzed. surroundings. This lets the players deal The work in the project is funded by the with cultural heritage in an interactive Programme Inter Carnot Fraunhofer and playful way. This, in addition to the from BMBF and ANR (grant fact that the creation of new missions is 01SF0804). very simple, allows Tidy City to be used in a large range of different contexts and Tidy city game on a smart phone. Links: makes it appealing to diverse user http://www.totem-games.org/ groups, eg tourists, students, teachers http://totem.fit.fraunhofer.de/tidycity and families. Reality Games”. The three-year project started in September 2009 and the Please contact: Tidy City and the Tidy City authoring research is undertaken by Fraunhofer Richard Wetzel tools are being developed as part of the Institute for Applied Information Fraunhofer FIT, Germany German-French research project Technology in Sankt Augustin, Tel: +49 2241 14 2148 “TOTEM – Theories and Tools for Germany, and Telecom & Management E-mail: Distributed Authoring of Mobile Mixed SudParis in Evry, France. The game [email protected]

Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a User Generated Content Service for Europeana by Nicola Aloia, Cesare Concordia, Anne van Gerwen, Carlo Meghini and N. Zeni

Inits2011-2015StrategicPlan,EuropeanaannouncedUserEngagement,ienewwaysforendusers toparticipateinculturalheritage,tobeoneoftheprimarytracksbywhichtheorganizationwill delivervalue.Europeanaintendstoenhancetheuserexperienceandofferservicesthatallowusers tointeractandparticipate.

Tools for the creation, management and tual exhibitions, reviews and even the Rather than focusing on a specific set of access to user-generated content are cur- creation of new collections. Greater UGC applications, ASSETS is devel- rently very popular, as witnessed by the participation will increase users’ oping a general purpose, back end com- success of sites such as YouTube and interest and loyalty. Europeana is there- ponent that aims at supporting any UGC Facebook, amongst others. The fore devoting increasing resources to service that Europeana offers its users. Europeana network comprises commu- initiatives that bring out the value of the To this end, the ASSETS back end com- nities of archivists, curators and librar- contribution those users can make. ponent implements an Application ians who show a growing interest in Programming Interface (API) for cre- exploring new methods of access and In response to these needs, the ASSETS ating, storing and manipulating UGC dialogue. User-Generated-Content Consortium has included the support of Units of Work, and for submitting these (UGC) is one aspect of this renewed user-generated content amongst the Units of Work to Europeana, in the form way of participating. Information about services it will develop for Europeana. of Europeana Submission Information cultural heritage exists outside the her- ASSETS is a two-year Best Practice Packages (SIPs). End users will interact itage institutions; artifacts, written Network that aims at improving the with their Units of Work through client sources and memories of individuals accessibility and usability of interfaces, which hide from them the complement collections held within the Europeana. The ASSETS Consortium unnecessary technical details and com- institutions. UGC services are designed comprises 24 partners, including insti- plexities of the back end, providing the to provide users with a means to support tutions from ten different European level of representation that is most suit- and interpret content. They will be countries and Japan, active in the field able for the specific UGC task at hand. It involved in storytelling, curating of vir- of cultural heritage and digital libraries. is expected that every UGC task will be

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 35 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

supported by a different end user inter- face. This will have no impact on Europeana, since each front end will talk to Europeana through the same API.

The API will relieve future UGC applica- tions from implementing any server side functionality; they will have to code only the client side, connecting the user world to the API. At the same time, the API will take away from Europeana the technical interoperability problems that would arise from integrating into its database objects coming from future UGC appli- cations. The service will rely on the Europeana Data Model (being developed by the Europeana version 1.0 project) in Figure 1: UGC service architecture. order to tackle the more serious semantic interoperability problems. The UGC service will be evaluated by UGC application. For instance, a simple the task developers and by the end users UGC task that takes place in a single ses- The definition of the conceptual model within the project’s lifetime. The former sion, such as an image upload, may be underlying the UGC API is the most dif- will evaluate the adequacy of the API, implemented by directly building the ficult challenge that the ASSETS UGC while the latter will evaluate the ade- corresponding SIP, by-passing the UoW team is facing. The model has to strike quacy of the front ends. The outcome of stage. On the other hand, another UGC an optimal balance between simplicity, the evaluation will lead to a refinement application may decide to publish a fin- ie easy-to-learn and easy-to-code by of both the back end component API ished UoW to a community of users in future UGC service developers, and and implementation, and the front end order to perform a socially oriented form generality, ie to satisfy the needs of any UGC applications. of mediation before submitting the UoW future UGC service. This conceptual to Europeana. These decisions will be model was defined during the first year Each user WS is endowed with an taken by the client side of the applica- of the ASSETS project on the basis of Inbox. Messages in the Inbox are of two tions, relying on appropriate shortcuts an analysis of different types of require- kinds: query results and notifications offered by the UGC API. ment. The model was subsequently used that communicate the result of submis- to define the UGC API, the first version sions. Positive notifications will report Links: of which should be ready by June 2011. the successful ingestion of a SIP, nega- http://www.europeana.eu A few initial UGC tasks will be imple- tive notifications report the reasons why http://www.assets4europeana.eu mented on top of the API through spe- a given SIP could not be ingested. http://version1.europeana.eu/web/europ cific front ends. These tasks will allow Rejected SIPs can be retrieved and re- eana-project/ Europeana users to contribute to the transformed into a UoW so that users http://europeanalabs.eu/wiki/ contents of the digital library in several can perform necessary reparations. ways, eg uploading new objects along Please contact: with simple descriptions, annotating It is important to note that these concepts Carlo Meghini existing objects, or enriching existing define a general-purpose schema, whose ISTI-CNR, Italy descriptions. machinery need not be used by every E-mail: [email protected]

Visual Semantic Browsing - A New Way to Access Digital Collections

by Alan Payne and Peter Fry

We are in the process of developing a system for taking museum and gallery visitors on a journey of discovery through a digital collection. It is entirely image-led and allows the visitor to wander through a collection following semantic relationships between objects in the collection.

In recent years, many collection owners photography of the artefacts then com- accessing the newly-formed digital col- from museums, art galleries and bining the resulting digital images in a lection is by keyword searching, often libraries have put a lot of effort into digi- database with textual descriptions of the along with some kind of structured cate- tizing their collections. This involves artefacts. Following this exhaustive gorization and browsing of image either document scanning or careful process, the standard method of thumbnails. This suits the expert and

36 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 other visitors who know exactly what Figure 1: A central image they are looking for, but for many visi- surrounded by other images tors who just want a general exploration from the collection which are of a collection, current systems don’t related by varying degrees to the work well. central image.

We have developed a system for visual semantic browsing - ViziQuest. This allows the visitor to explore a collection in a very different way. It is entirely image-led and takes the visitor on a journey of discovery through a collec- Figure 2: A selected image tion based on the visitor’s individual moves to the centre of the selection of images that they find inter- display and is surrounded by esting. The visitor is presented with a new images that are related to montage of images; Figure 1, for this selected one. instance, shows a central image sur- rounded by other images from the col- lection which are related by varying degrees to the central image. By selecting one of the surrounding images that interests them, this image moves to the centre of the display and is sur- rounded by new images that are related to this selected one (Figure 2). The tex- Figure 3: The textual tual descriptions are readily accessed by descriptions are readily accessed "flipping" the image (Figure 3). by "flipping" the image.

The collection owner simply supplies their database of images and descriptive texts. There is no further "pre-work" to be done on the data by the collection owner. We carefully examine the collection and build an ontology to describe the and depth of the collection. Ideally, this ontology is reviewed and refined with the collection owner or other domain expert. The ontology is then used to direct the building of relationships between the A current development project is to understand the formal aspects of narra- artefacts using Natural Language build some targeted educational ele- tive and appreciate what constitutes Processing (NLP) techniques. ments into the browsing experience. good practice in storytelling and report We are testing a modified version of writing. As well as assisting the pupils A system based on this work has been ViziQuest with a group of children with their story-telling skills, exploring installed at the Scott Polar Museum in (aged 9-11 years old) from a local pri- the collection in this way inevitably Cambridge, UK. It is proving very pop- mary school. A crucial element of this teaches them about the collection as a ular with visitors, both "experts" and stage in their learning is the ability to whole which in many cases has stimu- casual visitors, and with all age groups. create and format narratives, both fic- lated them to pay a live visit to the The image-centric nature of the system tional and factual. The system provides museum where the collection resides. (it requires no textual input whatever) nuance to the narrative by calling up acts as a clear draw. The museum cura- related images and exploits the textual Visual semantic browsing provides a tors are delighted with it, particularly in descriptions in the museum digital col- new way to access digital collections, the fact that it is enabling visitors to lections. This modified version requires opening up collections to a wider audi- unearth images from all parts of the col- the children to select images for hard ence, unearthing hidden depths of collec- lection, not just a narrow slice as would copy that act as props for them to build tions and extending the use of the hard be found with a traditional search. a story around. In this way they are pro- work involved in digitization projects. ducing their personalized stories and The basic system has now been consid- enriching them in ways not possible erably enhanced by the addition of with ordinary search methods. Please contact: audio and movie files that were part of Serendipitous browsing, favoured by Alan W Payne an archive from a further polar collec- the semantic browser, promotes lateral Deep Visuals Limited, Cambridge, UK tion. This new system has recently been thinking which in turn has a strong role Tel: +44 (0)1223 437163 installed in the museum, where again in creativity. By providing the tools E-mail: [email protected] visitor feedback is very positive. described, the students will better www.deepvisuals.com

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 37 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

Data Quality of Public Heritage Data in Professional Applications

by Jacco van Ossenbruggen

ProfessionalusersintheheritagedomainhavestartedtodeploydatapublishedontheWeb:datathatoften comesindifferentforms,fromdifferentsourcesandiscontrolledbydifferentorganizations.Inadditiontothe

dataintegrationproblemsinthebackend,CWI isalsostud yingt heuserinterfacec ha llengesinthefrontend.

annotate: Veroordeling van Johan van Oldenbarnevelt In the context of the Dutch MultimediaN Figure: Art annotation Veroordelingeroordeling van Johan van Who Historical persons e-culture project, we have been looking at Oldenbarnevelt person application developed by CWI in

What Iconclass (en), WordNet (en), events (nl) ICT-related tasks of professional users siege cooperation with the from the cultural heritage domain. Many Iconclass view all 40 results Rijksmuseum. While the user is Where[45K21] siegesiegeName of place or region SocietySociety,, CCivilization,ivilization, CCultureulture geographical place [45K] siegesiege, position war siege, position war (more info) of these tasks are now performed by SocietySociety,, CCivilization,ivilization, CCultureulture typing, the interface suggests subject on about 26 artworks W[94H]hen llastastDate, months year ofor theperiod siege and the fall of RP-P-OB-77.320 Trroyoy using a single information source at a enterCllassicalassical date MMythologyythology and Ancient HHistoryistory terms from different public web Blad met een voorstelling van de onthoofding van WordNetordNet view all 6 results Johan van Oldenbarnevelt op het Binnenhof te done | cancel siege (beleaguering, besieging) time, typically a web site of a trusted 's-Gravenhage op 13 mei 1619. Gezicht op het plein Societyociety,, Civilization, Culture data sources, in this case RKD’s met alle omringende gebouwen en het verzamelde blockade warfare; military affairsafffairsfairs publiek. In de toren linksboven het hof van prins siege of Orleans (Orleans) Maurits. Om de voorstelling van de onthoofding staan beleaguering siege, position war organization or, more often, on "in house" de portretten van de zes andere veroordeelden, een IconClass and Princeton’s Siege Perilous fortifications, military engineering scène met de kistt van VVanaan Ledenberg aan de galg en seat een gezicht op het kasteel Loevestein. attack ~ siege data: data collected and curated either by defence ~ siege WordNet. capture of city (after the siege) the users themselves or their direct col- 45K(+) raising the siege leagues working in the same institute. For our research, we selected tasks that could confusion in experiments with multiple and more user generated content finds obviously benefit from including mul- data sources. Even worse, when our its way into the cultu ral heritage field. tiple data sources, especially if those prototypes revealed conflicting claims The successor of MultimediaN, the sources were publically available from about the same art object or artist Dutch national research project the Web. We then looked at the implica- without explaining the source or prove- COMMIT, will start this summer. This tions of this shift from single source, nance of these claims, it led to users project will focus on provenance of, and

trusted data to multiple source, untrusted totally distrusting the ent ire system. trust in, curated and non-curated her-

data had on the user interface. itage data as one of its key research Another striking example was a proto- topics. These topics also apply to One thing we learned is that heritage annotation interface we developed domains other than cultural heritage. is never ‘sound and complete’. Even to enter metadata of artworks as part of a well-curated data sets of any substantial museum's collection registration In the European Fish4knowledge size contain many omissions, imprecise process. We studied this process exten- project, CWI is studying the interface values and plain errors. However, in prac- sively in the print room of the implications of data quality in large tice, in the single source setting, this Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where lit- scale data observations of coral reef hardly seems an issue: users typically erally hundreds of thousands of histor- fish. Since the database is filled with know what is in ‘their’ database and what ical prints are currently being digitized observations made by automatic feature is not, and which parts of the data are in and described. In the single source set- detectors analyzing large quantities of line with the institute's guidelines and ting, one specific interface worked fine underwater video camera footage, the which parts are not. Users take this into because it was optimized for finding, as quality of the data varies with the account, for example, when performing quickly as possible, an artist's name that quality of the detection algorithms used, search tasks in a museum's collection the user knew to be in the database: it the turbidity of the water, the movement management system. Our team at CWI ranked search results by frequency of of the fish, etc. How to convey the conducted several user experiments, use. The same interface, however, strengths and limitations of this data asking heritage professionals to think proved useless in the multiple source without overwhelming biologists with aloud during their search tasks. Remarks setting, because now the frequency- the technical details of automatic video along the lines of: "You would think I based ranking made it impossible to analysis algorithms is one of the chal- could just search on this keyword, but I judge whether a specific artist was not lenges in this project. know this part of the collection has not present at all or was just ranked too low been properly annotated yet, so instead I to appear in the top-N search results pre- Links: will ..." clearly indicate that users explic- sented. In the multiple source setting, a http://e-culture.multimedian.nl/ itly work around the problems in their simple alphabetically ordered list of http://www.europeana.eu/ data. search results proved to work much http://www.commit-nl.nl/ better than the frequency-based ranking. http://www.fish4knowledge.org/ However, this situation completely changed when we confronted users with These and other insights of the Please contact: similar quality issues in data sets they MultimediaN E-culture project are now Jacco van Ossenbruggen, CWI, The were either unfamiliar or less familiar being used in the Europeana project. Netherlands with. For example, the same type of The issues around dealing with varying Tel: +31 20 592 4141 errors users seamlessly worked around data quality in the user interface will E-mail: in a single source setting, often led to only become more relevant now more [email protected]

38 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 Discovering Europeana Users’ Search Behaviour by Diego Ceccarelli, Sergiu Gordea, Claudio Lucchese, Franco Maria Nardini, Raffaele Perego and Gabriele Tolomei

EuropeanaisastrategicprojectfundedbytheEuropeanCommissionwiththegoalofmaking Europe’sculturalandscientificheritageaccessibletothepublic.ASSETSisatwo-yearBestPractice Networkco-fundedbytheCIPPSPProgrammetoimproveperformance,accessibilityandusability oftheEuropeanasearchengine.HerewepresentacharacterizationoftheEuropeanalogsby showingoncommonbehaviouralpatternsoftheEuropeanausers.

The strong inclination for culture and beauty in Europe has created a rich abundance of artifacts, starting with antiquity and continuing to today. This cultural strength is recognized globally, making Europe the preferred destination for 50% of world tourism.

Europeana [1] is a long-term project Figure 1: Most popular queries submitted by Italian users. Size is proportional to frequency. funded by the European Commission with the goal of making Europe’s cul- tural and scientific heritage accessible to the well known painting. These exam- the public. Since 2008, about 1 500 insti- ples show how important it is to have a The Europeana logs show the behaviour tutions have contributed to Europeana, good formulation of users’ information of users interacting with the portal. We enabling people to explore Europe’s needs in textual queries when looking present here a preliminary characteriza- museums, libraries and archives. This for very specific information on the web tion of this behaviour, and a comparison huge amount of multilingual and multi- by using a portal like Europeana. This is with that of general Web users. Figure 2 media data is made available through the even more challenging since Europeana shows the frequency distribution of sub- Europeana Portal, a search engine that documents are cross-domain, multi-lin- mitted queries. As expected, the popu- allows users to explore the content by gual, and multi-cultural. larity of the queries follows a power-law means of textual queries. distribution (p(x) µ k× x-a), where x is In order to improve the Europeana the popularity rank. The best fitting a Due to the increasing amount of infor- users’ search experience, the ASSETS parameter is a = 0.86, which indicates mation published, access to the descrip- project [2] has the overall goal of the skew of the frequency distribution. tion of a specific masterpiece is enhancing the performance of the The larger the α, the larger the portion of becoming increasingly difficult, in par- Europeana search engine. One of the the log covered by the top most frequent ticular when the user is not able to for- most important resources for enhancing queries. The same analysis conducted on mulate a sufficiently discriminating the users’ search experience in large query logs coming from commercial query. For example, if we search today information spaces is the use of the Web search engines shows larger values for general terms like “renaissance” or information stored in query logs. The of a (2.4 and 1.84 respectively for an “art nouveau” we obtain more than 10 knowledge extracted from query logs Excite and a Yahoo! query log). 000 results. If we search for the term can be used to enhance both efficiency “Gioconda” we find a couple of hundred (ie, response time, throughput) and effi- Such a small value of α means that the of items, while the query “Mona Lisa, cacy (ie, quality of results) of informa- most popular queries submitted to Da Vinci” provides us twenty images of tion retrieval platforms. Europeana do not account for a signifi-

Figure 2: Frequency distribution of queries. Figure 3: Distribution of the queries over the countries.

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 39 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

cantly large portion of the query log. This might be explained by considering the characterizing features of Europeana. Indeed, since Europeana is strongly focused on the specific context of cultural heritage, its users are likely to have a greater vocabulary, and there- fore use a more diverse vocabulary. In addition, we found that the average length of queries is 1.86 terms, which is again lower than the typical value observed in Web search engine logs. We can argue that the Europeana users use a Figure 4: Distribution of the searches over Figure 5: Distribution of the searches over richer vocabulary, with discriminative the days. the hours. queries made of specific domain terms. probably due to the fact that, during this intensively used by people working in the Figure 3 shows the distribution of the period, Europeana announced the cultural heritage field and thus mainly queries grouped by country. France, indexing of new collections and con- accessed during working hours, whereas Germany, and Italy are the three major tents of 14 million documents. a commercial Web search engine is used countries accounting for about the 50% of by a wider range of users with the most the total traffic of the Europeana portal. Figure 5 shows the load on the Europeana disparate information needs throughout portal on an hourly basis. We observe a the entire day. Furthermore, Figure 4 reports the particular trend. The peak of load on the number of queries submitted per day. Europeana portal is in the afternoon, Links: We observe a periodic behaviour on a between 15.00 and 17.00. This is slightly [1] http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ weekly basis, with a number of peaks different from commercial Web search [2] http://www.assets4europeana.eu/ probably related to some Europeana engines where the peak is reached in the dissemination or advertisement activi- evening, between 19.00 and 23.00. A pos- Please contact: ties. For example, we observe several sible explanation for this phenomenon Raffaele Perego, ISTI–CNR, Italy peaks between 18 and 22 November, could be that the Europeana portal is Tel: +39 050 3152993

Preparing the Ground for the German Digital Library

by Kai Stalmann, Marion Borowski and Sven Becker

Providinguserswithinformationandknowledgeaboutculturalheritageobjectshasbeenacore businessoflibraries,museums,archives,andotherinstitutionsforcenturies.Accessingthe information,however,hasalwaysbeenlimitedtothosewholiterallystepthroughtheportalsof theseelevatedplacesofacquiredknowledge.Digitizingandpublishingofdigitizedobjectstothe webbringsknowledgetoamuchbroaderaudience.Itisevenconceivablethatculturalheritage mightonceagainplayasignificantroleinsociety,providingitiseasyenoughtoexplore,openly accessibleandapplicabletorangeofpurposes.

With the use of the right key terms, a Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent tastic uses, including opportunities for search engine can offer the user a veri- Analysis and Information Systems IAIS those who are artistically inclined who table treasure trove of knowledge. The in conjunction with the Federal wish to work with the bare material and “treasure”, however, can vary depending Government Representative for Culture use it for their own creative productions. on what the individual is searching for, and Media (BKM) relies on a modular ranging from an object located some- and scalable, light weight architecture, a Finding items turns out to be amazingly where on the globe to an image of or clear cut API based on open standards, a easy on the “Cortex platform” which deeper knowledge about a concept or flexible model, and the use of given underlies the DDB. The state of the art object. datasets and smart algorithms. search engine supports keyword search and facetted search which are usually Which technologies might be useful in The DDB may hold binaries like found on commercial search interfaces. enabling the public to access their cul- images, scanned book pages, digitized Facets provide a means to drill down tural heritage in a variety of ways? The 3D objects and video material, thus iteratively, and thus allow for easy man- approach taken for implementing the allowing users to work directly with agement of the largest result sets. What Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) at these assets. This offers a range of fan- makes a difference here is the semantic

40 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 The DDB as a linked data project: see the woods and see the trees...

richness of the facets which depends on tically rich facets, more advanced The DDB is a national project that will both the quality of the model and of the queries based on SPARQL will allow be steered by a “Kompetenznetzwerk” mapping of the input data to that model. for data mining the cultural heritage. (competence network) DDB consisting The DDB uses a harmonized model Data mining in general unveils correla- of members of many institutions that based mainly on CIDOC CRM and the tions that are extremely difficult to contribute content to the DDB. But the new Europeana Data Model (EDM). detect without those technologies. DDB may also be embraced by an These models were designed explicitly ecosystem that still has to be evocated. with a vision of a network of knowledge The DDB consists of a A first exciting glimpse of an ecosystem in mind. (Cortex) for managing access, search, around the DDB was presented in and the ingestion of objects. The ingest Berlin in April 2011. Therefore a set of Creating a network of knowledge is at service binds objects to identifiers, distributed services where mashed up to the heart of the DDB project. Over the resolves resources already in place, and extend the core DDB functionality. We years, millions of things, events, actors, links objects to internal and external anticipate that the DDB could stimulate places and time spans will become resources. The ingest process is the activities around cultural heritage entangled by different kinds of relation- tricky part since cultural heritage meta- objects. Beyond ‘looking for some- ships between these entities. Thus the data files differ tremendously in thing’ this might include ‘exploring the DDB contributes to the semantic web. It semantic richness, format (DC, EAD, betweens’, and ultimately also pro- also depends on the semantic web: Lido, Marc, Mods, to name a few), and viding functionality that does some- vocabularies and ontologies are needed size (from less than 1KB to over thing new to both objects and betweens. for recognizing relationshipss and iden- 100MB for one item). Despite tifiers. A two-way relationship exists approaches towards standardizing, the Links: between users and the DDB; users metadata formats of one kind may well http://www.bundesregierung.de/ profit from a DDB but are also the most still be used in many different ways. In Content/DE/Pressemitteilungen/BPA/ powerful resource for enabling the net- our approach, the incoming data is pre- 2009/12/2009-12-02-bkm-deutsche- work of knowledge to come into exis- pared for ingest by a separate tool called digitale-bibliothek.html tence. The unique selling point of the ASC or Augmented SIP Creator (SIP DDB is not only the original content, standing for Submission Information DDB project website: but also what given persistent identi- Package, the term is borrowed from the http://www.deutsche-digitale- fiers, ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘the OAIS Reference Model). The Cortex bibliothek.de/ crowd’ may reveal as hidden links middleware, a set of metadata map- between the objects of cultural heritage. pings, and the ASC are currently being Fraunhofer IAIS Netmedia: built at Fraunhofer IAIS (a first release http://www.iais.fraunhofer.de/ Analyzing single objects (like museum was accepted in April 2011). The mid- index.php?id=191&L=1 pieces or dossiers in an archive) may dleware makes use of various widely still require travelling to the place accepted technologies like Spring, Documents on the Cortex platform where these objects reside whenever REST, JSON, XML). As backends (currently only in German): high quality digital representations can Cortex uses a triple store, Solr as a http://www.iais.fraunhofer.de/ not be made accessible online due to search index, and a storage cloud. The cortex.html?&L=1 technical or legal restrictions. But architecture was explicitly designed for exploring relationships between entities reuse in similar projects. Since the Please contact: that are part of the knowledge model underlying model and the mappings can Kai Stalmann, Marion Borowski, Sven encourages a different kind of explo- be adapted to other needs, this system Becker ration that is not restricted by physical could be applied to any in which digital Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany borders. The DDB will therefore sup- objects form a knowledge network E-mail: {kai.stalmann, port different levels of queries. Besides based on either given or automatically marion.borowski, keyword search combined with seman- extracted metadata. sven.becker}@iais.fraunhofer.de

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 41 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

Managing and Archiving Digital Audio: The GAMELAN Project

by Jérôme Barthélemy

TheGAMELANprojectisdevotedtothedevelopmentofanenvironmentformanagementandarchivalofdigital audioandmusic(inFrench,Gamelanstandsfor“GestionetArchivagedelaMusiqueEtdeL’AudioNumérique”). Itwillprovideanintelligentarchivalsystemformusic,basedonthehistoryandthesemanticsoftheproduction.

The production of a music piece – either treatment. The purpose is finally to art music or pop music - using digital mark out the variety of processes technology is a very complex process involved and to find out the invariants, involving many people, an array of tech- enabling on the one hand to drive a nologies and many different processes. It musical production, and on the other generally results in a very complex set of hand to manage musical contents as digital objects, and the organization of results of a production." this set of files for the purpose of archiving and eventually republication or At the current stage, the project has repurposing is not a straightforward task. developed a first prototype of the envi- Gamelan takes care of the future of digitally ronment that is able to track some of the At this stage, it should be evident that it encoded music. activities coming from end-user applica- is not sufficient to archive the result of tions, record these events, and apply the production, the "master". In reference ties of users during the production some very simple semantic rules to the to Acousmatic music, composer Daniel process - including the activity done in set of events in order to define new rela- Teruggi states that “It may seem that the end-users’ tools like sequencers - audio tionships. The prototype is, at this stage, essential issue for an Acousmatic work is imports and exports, mixing and able to determine the audio sources of a to be preserved as such; in the same way applying effects. mix and to present that relationship in a a traditional instrumental score seems to graphical interface to the end user. In convey the necessary information for By recording the main events, the envi- parallel, studies have been done in order music performance (which it does not, it ronment will be able to track the activi- to define the bases for the future lan- conveys partial information, the missing ties. But this is evidently insufficient for guage for musical production. The next information is reconstructed through use applying semantic qualifiers to digital step will be to enter into an iterative tradition). However, the situation is objects and for detecting the relation- process to refine the language and the much more complex due to the charac- ships between the different objects of the environment. teristics of the production environment, audio production (original recordings, which interfere with the nature of the modifications, results of mixes, etc.). For The expected outcomes of the project result and the number of possible ele- this purpose, we need to develop a lan- are the development of a language for ments to be preserved.” guage for the description and representa- musical production and of an environ- tion of musical production processes, as ment that is able to track events and The new uses facilitated by digital tech- well as for the musical object itself. The build an intelligent, semantically quali- nologies make it possible to envisage definition of this language is at the very fied archive. new productions - what is known as core of the GAMELAN project, and is "repurposing", even in the domain of the subject of a PhD thesis (advisors GAMELAN started in November 2009 popular music, such as the creation of a Bruno Bachimont, UTC, and Alain and is scheduled to end in February version for karaoke. For art music, other Bonardi, IRCAM). 2013. The project is partially supported forms of repurposing, such as musico- by the French ANR (National Agency logical studies, have to be anticipated. The main difficulty in developing this for Research). It involves four partners: This is true too, for popular music, in language is to define the right level of IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de which (as pointed out by Marc Danger abstraction. As explained by Bruno Coordination Acoustique/Musique), from EMI), "a lot of fans would hear the Bachimont: "We are looking for a level INA (Institut National de ninety-one mixes for ‘Billie Jean’ and of representation that enables to hold l’Audiovisuel), UTC (Université de understand why Jackson and audio engi- [sic] the content invariants without Technologie de Compiègne), and EMI neer Bruce Swedien chose to go with the being burdened by the incidental Music France. second mix". The general absence of aspects of its technical implementation. semantic qualifiers on the objects pro- This issue is very close to the so-called Link: duced makes these studies and new pro- ‘Knowledge Level’ in knowledge engi- http://www.gamelan-projet.fr ductions almost impossible to realize. neering, where this level would get the treatment imposed to representations, Please contact: This is where GAMELAN intends to being more general than the code imple- Jérôme Barthélemy, IRCAM, France develop a new approach, by developing menting this treatment, but precise and Tel: +33 1 44 78 15 53 an environment that will track the activi- prescriptive enough to reproduce that E-mail: [email protected]

42 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 The Open Kunstkammer Data Project by Vladimir Ivanov

Thisprojecthasledtothepublicationofmetadata(asLinkedData)relatingtomorethan40000 photosfromRussia’soldestmuseum.

In 2009 general activity on digitization Figure 1: The carried out by Peter the Great Museum website of MAE of Anthropology and Ethnography RAS. Russian Academy of Sciences (the Kunstkammer or MAE RAS) had led to the creation of dataset consisting of more than 40 000 digital images and their descriptions in English and Russian. The dataset supplied with a search tool is accessible on the MAE RAS’s website in HTML format. In 2010 the Computational Linguistics Laboratory of the Kazan Federal University initiated the Open Kunstkammer Data project (OKD) format which allows automatic genera- both languages). A special software aimed at standardization of metadata tion of target (CIDOC CRM) represen- component supporting regular updating representation and publication the tation for each source metadata record. of the RDF-dataset was also developed. dataset as Linked Data. The result of this step is an Resource Its implementation was quite straight- Description Framework (RDF) dataset forward because updates made by users The OKD is a research and development that contains the CIDOC CRM classes, never affect the source database project inspired by Tatyana properties and their interrelated schema. There is therefore, no need to Bogomazova, head of IT department of instances. The dataset describes the update the mapping. Finally, all the MAE RAS. Bogomazova articulated the meaning of the source data in terms of RDF-triples were loaded into the project’s aim, which is to enrich the the CIDOC CRM. Virtuoso Universal Server RDF-store. existing dataset using the International Public SPARQL Protocol and RDF Committee for Documentation of the An additional task carried out in the Query Language endpoint International Council of Museums OKD project was to “SKOSify” MAE (http://data.kunstkamera.ru/sparql) is (ICOM/CIDOC) recommendations and RAS’s controlled bilingual vocabularies supported by Open Source edition of the best practices of the Semantic Web. (“SKOS” stands for Simple Knowledge the Virtuoso Universal Server. The To this end, two steps were taken. First, Organization System). The list of server’s software also supports derefer- a legacy database schema was mapped vocabularies includes “Places”, “Actors encing of URIs, which means that any to the Web Ontology Language (OWL) (Authors and Collectors)”, URI in the RDF-store not only identi- representation of the CIDOC “Expeditions”, “Ethnicity”, “Subjects” fies a resource (eg image or vocabulary Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC and “Genres”. SKOS-based versions of concept), but also provides access to CRM). The mapping process raised a these vocabularies are also represented corresponding RDF-triples which few semantic issues which were in RDF format. The total amount of describe the resource. resolved only after consultations with RDF-triples (ie statements in the form museum staff and IT-experts. The map- of “subject-predicate-object”) in the The second step is the definition of ping was defined in a machine readable RDF-dataset is more than 5 million (for mappings between concepts from MAE

Figure 2: A graphical representation of the mapping fragment. Figure 3: A map with creation places and museum items.

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 43 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

RAS controlled vocabularies and con- cepts from external datasets. DBPedia (http://dbpedia.org) and Geonames (http://geonames.org) were chosen as target datasets for their multilingualism and global coverage. The main issue we faced here was ambiguity. For example, concepts from the “Places” vocabulary can have up to hundreds of “equiva- lents” when matched to the Geonames concepts using labels. A set of special heuristic disambiguation procedures were developed. For both target datasets these procedures significantly decreased the ambiguity. More than Figure 4: MAE RAS description used by the Sig.ma. 60% of matched concepts (in the “Place” vocabulary) have a single equivalent and only 6% of matched concepts have more than ten equiva- lents after applying the procedure. However, manual disambiguation is still required.

External datasets enrich the source data- base with useful information. Geo- graphic coordinates from Geonames could be useful when showing the MAE RAS dataset on the global map (see Fig- ure 3). Multiple languages of DBPedia Figure 5: A set of photos to which two attributes (“Islam” and “Cultural landscape”) resources allow multilingual searching. have been assigned.

The MAE RAS RDF-dataset could be framework (http://iwb.fluidops.com/) is useful in external services and semantic shown in Figure 5. Links: web applications. For instance, triples http:// www.kunstkamera.ru from the dataset are already used by the Future research and development activ- http://data.kunstkamera.ru/sparql Sig.ma (http://sig.ma) semantic mashup ities are related to improvement of auto- application (see Figure 4). matic matching and disambiguation Please contact: quality, integration with the original Vladimir Ivanov Other applications can also consume the search tool and Kazan Federal University, MAE RAS RDF-triples online. A deployed on the www.kunstkamera.ru, Computational Linguistics Laboratory, screenshot of such a software compo- and providing end-users with new serv- Kazan, Russia nent based on Information Workbench ices based on the published dataset. E-mail: [email protected]

Pat.mapa: Linking Catalan Cultural Heritage

by Mercè López, Oriol Almirall and Sergi Fernández

Pat.mapaisanambitiousprojectthatpresentstheCatalanculturalheritageontheInternetinan integratedandinnovativeformat.Theprojectaddressesthesemanticwebchallengeofaggregating cross-domainculturalheritagecontentintoasemanticallyrichintelligentsystem.Pat.mapaisan interdisciplinaryprojectthatforthefirsttimeintheCatalanarea,implementstheprinciplesof linkeddata,ontologiesandcomplexdatavisualizationonculturalheritagecontent.

The mission of Pat.mapa is to present We can help to bring cultural heritage rant, or between the Roman Church of the Catalan cultural heritage content in alive with the implementation of tech- Sant Climent de Taüll and the mod- a different way. Heritage is not an iso- nologies like the Semantic Web. ernist architect Lluís Domènech i lated area and only related to the past. Through the ontological approach, we Montaner. Cultural heritage is alive, connected can see what links exist between the with the real world, the science, the Monastery of Sant Benet de Bages Key concepts on which the project is gastronomy, the companies, the people. with Ferran Adrià of El Bulli restau- built:

44 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 • Representation and vision: Pat.mapa implicit and explicit concepts and rela- of content through this tool, we con- will represent a set of cultural values tionships used in cultural heritage docu- tribute to the dissemination of knowl- and assets and offer their differing mentation (official standard ISO edge about Catalan cultural heritage. views and interpretations. 21127:2006). • Evolution and creativity: The project Pat.mapa is a long term project. The aims to show the evolution of the At the same time, given that much of starting point is the cultural heritage Catalan cultural heritage in order to the relevant information about the his- information but it will continue promote knowledge generation and tory of cultural heritage artefacts growing. We are aggregating content innovation as an economic engine (monuments, archaeological sites etc) from databases on architecture, archae- and source of cultural wealth. is in free text fields on the databases, a ology and museums, and this will be • Innovation and participation: This new tool for natural language pro- extended to other areas of knowledge, project represents innovation in data cessing has been developed. Thus, we culture and society (performing arts, capture and content presentation. It can treat complex and abundant and tourism for instance). Pat.mapa is makes extensive use of digital tools sources of text, identify characters and the first step in the Catalan govern- and collaboration in order to develop events and incorporate them semi- ment’s strategy on Linked Data for cul- a Catalan digital culture. automatically into the existing onto- tural content. In the near future, we • Quality and proximity. Pat.mapa will logical structure. will also face the web 2.0 challenge become a reference point for the dis- and explore the possibilities of semination of cultural heritage and Furthermore, we face the challenge of memory organizations and citizen’s local civil society. making visible the entire network of contributions. relationships that gives us the ontology. At a technical level, the project repre- For this reason, the i2cat Foundation is Pat.mapa is a project led by the sents a major challenge both in the developing a visualization tool that Directorate General for the Cultural structuring and standardizing of data allows complex data visualization of Heritage (Department of Culture, assets such as technology development any ontology.. Technically, this means Government of Catalonia), developed (enrichment of ontologies tool and visu- working with converter triple-labelled jointly with the i2cat Foundation and alization of complex data). graphs, a graph viewer and a system of ISOCO Company. The project began in widgets customized according to the 2008 and is currently in beta. The public The process of structuring data is based ontology. The navigation tool for cul- presentation is scheduled for on an intensive mapping between dif- tural heritage data is a viewer based on November 2011. ferent databases and metadata manage- standard HTML5 using processing.js ment (thesauri, controlled vocabularies, javascript libraries, jQuery and a etc.). The main innovation and chal- physics engine developed by Jeff Traer. Link: lenge in this work process is the appli- The viewer reads data from knowledge http://patmapa.gencat.cat (beta version): cation of the principles of the semantic bases classified on ontologies and web. We are working on the implemen- shows their relationship graphs. Thanks Please contact: tation of an ontology based on the stan- to the ontology visualization tool, we Mercè López dard CIDOC Conceptual Reference can provide an interface that allows the i2cat Foundation, Spain Model (CRM), that provides definitions user to browse the map of ontologies on Tel: +34 93.551.06.81 and a formal structure for describing the cultural heritage. With the presentation E-mail: [email protected]

Figure 1: Pat.mapa overview.

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 45 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

GeoMemories: A Spatial-Temporal Atlas of the Italian Landscape

by Andrea Marchetti, Elizabeth Jane Shepherd and Maurizio Tesconi

WepresentaninteractiveWeb2.0applicationthatisbeingdevelopedwiththeaimofshowingthe evolutionoftheItalianlandscapethroughanimportanthistoricalarchiveofaerialphotographs.

The AeroFototeca Nazionale (AFN) of form a parallel virtual archive. In this Imagery as the reference map. Finally, the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage way, the originals, on paper or film, can the georeferenced photos are joined in Rome maintains an extensive set of be protected and preserved. The images together using mosaicing techniques. some million aerial photographs consti- are then processed as shown in Figure 1 tuting an important memory archive of to create historical maps. Each digitized Initially, we have started to process 200 the Italian territory throughout the 20th photo is cropped and eventually nor- photos covering the northern part of century. This huge archive provides a malized to eliminate any differences in Tuscany, for the period 1943-1945; from picture of Italy as it was 70 years ago and exposure; they are then orthorectified mid-2011 the set will be increased to during its transformation by the post-war and georeferenced, using Google 1000/2000 photos. The first small set reconstruction and the economic boom, and also by natural disasters such as severe earthquakes and floods.

GeoMemories In 2010, the AFN and the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of CNR in Pisa signed an agreement to make this archive accessible via Internet through a Web 2.0 mashup application that dis- plays the evolution of the Italian Landscape. Thanks to funding from the Italian Internet Domains Registry, the GeoMemories project was launched with the aim of creating a web platform covering spatial-temporal dimensions and also integrating multimedia data from other archives. The project is coor- dinated by Andrea Marchetti, Head of the IIT Lab “Web Applications for the Future Internet” and Elizabeth Jane Shepherd, Director of AFN.

Version 5.0 of Google Earth (GE) Figure: 1 The process for creating historical maps from aerial strip photography. includes a timeline to display historical imagery. However, this new feature has important limitations, in particular, most of the Google images are from satellites and are relatively recent. Italy, for example, has significant coverage only from 2003. The only samples of actual historic images (1943) concern some large cities (Rome, Florence, Naples, Turin, Trieste and Venice) and the image resolution is very low. In addition, GE manages geographic data layers without considering the time variable.Our aim is to rebuild a virtual globe, similar to GE but oriented towards the management of the time.

From Photos to Historical Maps The vertical photos made available to the project are digitized and stored to Figure: 2 A screenshot of the first prototype for browsing the historical maps.

46 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 has allowed us to test several procedures Data integration visualization of historical maps. A major for processing aerial strip photos. With the use of geographic reference issue will be to find the resources (geotagging), Google Earth integrates needed to digitize and process the entire The workflow for creating historical into its maps different layers, such as archives. We must also find ways to maps is very heavy. Although we will video, pictures and webcam. We intend solve critical questions regarding the develop automatic procedures in order to use the same mechanism adding the copyright of the original photos. to reduce the human effort required, the time value (timetagging). The geo-his- size of the archive means that it will be torical data layers will be obtained Our hope is that the outcome of this necessary to develop solutions based on through web mining techniques, or fil- project will be to raise interest and to social contributions. An important future tered from open archives such as attract funding at European and interna- activity of the project will concern the Wikipedia, Youtube, Flicker, or via tional levels in activities that will ensure development of collaborative web appli- social contributions related to initiatives the protection and sharing of heritage cations for georeferencing activities. for memory preservation. The result will aerial photography. be a sort of Historical Geographical Data Display Atlas, where it will be possible to build The historical maps - each referring to a spatial-temporal tours. Link: specific historical period - will be http://www.geomemories.org browsable in the four dimensions via a Future activities web application based on a Google This article describes the first steps of Please contact: Earth plugin and some javascript the GeoMemories project and the chal- Andrea Marchetti, IIT-CNR, Italy libraries. Figure 2 shows the first proto- lenges currently being addressed in Tel: +39 0503152649 type of the application. designing tools for the realization and E-mail: [email protected]

Nephele – Smart Digital Memory of Artwork Conservation by Barbara Zitová, Miroslav Beneš and Janka Hradilová

Nepheleisacomprehensiveinformationsystemforprocessingandarchivingdataproducedinthe processofartconservation.

The benefits of using digital image pro- The Nephele project is realized in close • Content based image retrieval cessing in the area of cultural heritage cooperation between the experts from • Sample preprocessing were identified many years ago. New the Institute of and • Sample analysis – layer segmentation, sensors and modern techniques are Automation, the Academy of Sciences layer description and morphology employed in the study and in conserva- of CR, and from the Academic • Material description tion of old, and often damaged, art- Materials Research Laboratory for • Material classification. works. The Nephele project introduced Painted Artworks, joint site of the here, focuses on material analysis Academy of Fine Arts and Institute of The Nephele system should serve as an research and addresses the key issue of Inorganic Chemistry, also belonging to archiving environment with the ability the art conservation - identification of the Academy of Sciences of CR. All to process material reports. The data is the painting materials used. organizations are located in Prague, used to interpret painting techniques Czech Republic. In addition to this tight and to support the choice of proper con- The Nephele system was designed for partnership, we are also incorporating servation method and materials. The archiving and use of material research suggestions and ideas from other content of the Nephele extended data- reports. To art conservators, it offers better sources, including laboratories, conser- base reflects the structure of individual access to the archived material reports vation studios (UK, USA), and confer- reports, which describe the process of they use. Furthermore, its internally ence and workshop discussions. The material research of given artwork. implemented methods for image data pro- direct participation of the experts from They contain all acquired information cessing improve the outcome of data the cultural heritage area proved to be about the object - general information analyses and the functioning of the data- very important in the development of about the artwork and its author, infor- base. Its image retrieval system offers the tools for the conservators. The mation about samples taken from the report retrieval based on visual similarity project started officially in 2006 and is artwork, results of chemical analyses, of studied samples. This feature eases the ongoing. and scanned parts analyzed in different complicated task of retrieval of relevant modalities. The implicitly included experience from previous conservation In general, the functional objectives of imaging modalities are microscopic cases. Such a database with a broad spec- the Nephele system can be summarized data in visible and ultraviolet light and trum of reports can serve as a knowledge as follows: scanning electron microscope (SEM) base for future actions. • Archiving – standard database services data.

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 47 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

Figure 1: Results of the content based image retrieval. The left column contains query specimens; the subsequent columns in the corresponding rows are results of the retrieval in order of their similarity.

The standard database functionality, multimodal data, which can be consecu- we want to create a knowledge base of such as report creation, editing, or saving tively enhanced (denoising, artifact reports for use in future conservation is upgraded by an image based search removal, deconvolution), geometrically cases. Moreover, as a byproduct of the function, which fetches the image-wise aligned (mutual information), and, proposed research, we plan to create a most similar reports and its usage is often finally, segmented into individual mate- taxonomy of material descriptors. more natural than standard databases for rial layers (a feature-based approach). the operator. The content-based image These steps produce set of base struc- Link: retrieval approach is implemented here tures, which are homogenous and can http://zoi.utia.cas.cz/nephele.html (based on co-occurrence matrices and be further described and analyzed. The wavelet based descriptors), which com- indentified structures serve as an input Please contact: pares the query image sample with for more sophisticated tasks such as the Barbara Zitová archived image data (see Figure 1). This aforementioned image based retrieval, Dept. of Image Processing , UTIA - functionality is enabled due to the image fusion, or used material classifi- Institute of Information Theory and included image processing modules, cation. An example of the Nephele Automation, Academy of Sciences which go beyond the functionality of system GUI is presented in Figure 2. of the Czech Republic / CRCIM, ordinary databases and, furthermore, are Czech Republic intensively used in the process of art- The Nephele project aims to facilitate Tel: +420 266 052 390 work analysis and report creation. the tedious work of art conservators E-mail: [email protected] with the use of image processing The ultimate aim of the image pro- methods and database technology. The Janka Hradilová, Academy of Fine cessing modules is the identification system is still under development, with Arts in Prague, Czech Republic and description of individual material the described functionality being the Tel: +420 233 015 324 layers. The Nephele system can process final aim of the project. In the long run E-mail: [email protected]

Figure 2: An example of the Nephele system GUI.

48 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 Soft Sensors: The New frontier in Measurement for Non-Invasive Monitoring of Cultural Heritage Sites by Umberto Maniscalco and Giovanni Pilato

Softsensorsareinnovativetoolsfortheacquisitionofmeasurementsincomplexexperimental conditions.Wepresentasetofsoftsensorsdesignedforthespatialmeasurementforecasting ofenvironmentalatmosphericparametersinordertosolvetheproblemofnon-invasive monitoringofarchaeologicalsites.

For the conservation of cultural her- study and the development of an inte- model from real data. This approach itage it is crucial to have non-invasive grated approach for computer aided allows the computation of a given vari- tools capable of monitoring both the cultural heritage conservation), we able value from other measurements physical and chemical conditions of the were asked by the “Agency for that are related to it. various materials composing the arte- Cultural Heritage of the Aosta Region, facts. The classical approach to artefact Italy” to find a solution for the non- Our methodology realizes a spatial fore- monitoring is to apply physical sensors invasive monitoring of cultural her- cast of environmental parameters in the to the artefact for a long time. These itage sites. presence of one or more atmospheric sampling campaigns must be repeated monitoring stations (AMS) in the neigh- many times. This is a long process and We propose to employ the soft sensor bourhood of the artefact. such actions are typically hard to paradigm. Soft Sensors, known also as The spatial forecast is based on a realize because they are expensive virtual sensors, are software tools number of neural networks organized as and/or invasive, reducing as a conse- capable of calculating quantities that an interconnected system. In this quence the attractiveness and the full- cannot be measured or that are difficult system, each neural network (or group fruition of the site. For this reason, in to measure. They are based on technolo- of neural networks) constitutes a single the context of the SIINDA project (an gies that provide an estimation of meas- soft sensor capable of capturing the Italian national project regarding the urements by creating a mathematical associative model among the data and

Figure 1: Overview of the spatial forecast and HyperSensor architecture.

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 49 Special Theme: ICT for Cultural Heritage

to estimate accurately an environmental state of the artefact is thus dynamic, and Recently, we introduced the parameter value in a specific spot of the will change according to atmospheric HyperSensor architecture (see Figure 1): artefact. As the associative model is parameters. This means that the recog- a mixture of several soft sensors, based induced through a data driven approach, nition of a critical state in the environ- on different neural network models. The a set of sensors must be installed on the ment, and the knowledge of the time performance of this new architecture has artefact for a reasonable (preferably period during which this state will been statistically analyzed. In compar- short) training time in order to measure remain critical, is extremely important, ison with traditional soft sensor architec- these parameters. After the training since it is the pre-condition of a degra- tures, this architecture gives better phase the set of sensors is removed from dation process. Therefore, we have results for each evaluator and in any the artefact. adopted and adapted the soft sensor measurement condition. technology to develop a new method- Once the soft sensors have learned the ology for the non-invasive measure- Our methodology has been applied to associative model, we can derive the ment of atmospheric parameters. the Roman theatre (see Figure 1) in the parameter values that would have been city of Aosta for which we have a suit- measured by physical sensors. This is We have designed and developed sev- able set of atmospheric parameters achieved using the AMS as the data eral kinds of soft sensor based on dif- measured both by two AMSs located source and the set of soft sensors as the ferent models of neural networks and close to the theatre and by real sensors forecaster. This approach is conceived have analyzed how well they are able to placed on the theatre. as a general methodology that can be estimate the measurements from a employed for the non-invasive meas- metrological point of view. The idea is The effectiveness of the methodology in urement of critical parameters in cul- to make them work as a substitute for monitoring cultural heritage sites has tural heritage sites. physical sensors. We have introduced been validated and approved by the and adopted an “ad hoc” validation pro- Cultural heritage authorities of Aosta. Damage to artefacts are always the cedure, which consists of two phases: a result of interaction between the mate- statistical phase based on several statis- rials composing the objects and the tical estimators, and a validation by environmental factors, including pollu- comparison phase. This procedure is Please contact: tants, surrounding them. In particular, based on a “substitution error” that we Umberto Maniscalco or Giovanni the physical and chemical properties of have defined as the difference between Pilato the materials composing the artefact the values estimated by a soft sensor ICAR-CNR, Palermo, Italy typically change in an attempt to reach and the measurement provided by a real E-mail: equilibrium with the environment. The sensor. {maniscalco,pilato}@pa.icar.cnr.it

Mathematical Models for Copper Sulphation

by Fabrizio Clarelli, Barbara De Filippo, and Roberto Natalini

Airpollutionisoneofthemostseriouscausesofdegradationinbronzemonumentsandartifacts;

inparticular,sulphurdioxide(SO2)isoneofthemaincausesofbronzedisease.Mathematicians havenowbeguntomodelthiskindofprobleminordertoassisttheprotectionandrestorationof bronzeartifacts.Inourresearch,wehaveintroducedafreeboundarymodelwhichdescribesthe

growthofcorrosiononthesurfaceofbronzemonumentsunderSO2 aggression,quantifyingthe influenceofdifferentenvironmentalfactorssuchasconcentrationofpollutants,butalsohumidity andtemperature.

Deterioration of bronze (monuments years, there is still a harmful concen- Within this complex framework, mathe- and artifacts) is a complex problem and tration of pollutants, such as sulphur matical modelling may be useful, simul-

one of the main concerns for people dioxide (SO2), which negatively taneously providing both quantitative working in the field of conservation affects the conservation of bronze. information and of the var- and restoration of Cultural Heritage. It ious processes involved. Using the basic

is extremely difficult to isolate a single SO2 can react with copper, producing laws of electro-chemistry, models can factor in these processes, which are the several products of corrosion, in partic- take into account environmental condi-

result of the interaction between var- ular brochantite (Cu4(OH)6SO4), a tions and their variations (air pressure, ious mechanisms, many of which also common copper hydroxide sulphate. temperature, moisture, rainfall, and con- occur in natural weathering. This process greatly depends on the centrations of pollutants) and can be Atmospheric pollution, however, can nature of the copper sample and on the used as additional tools in determining certainly be considered as one of the presence of moisture. The condensation optimal strategies of intervention. key contributing factors. Despite the of moisture may depend on the structure reduction in air pollution in European of the material, and is critical to its reac- At the Istituto per le Applicazioni del urban areas that has occurred in recent tivity to pollutants. Calcolo “M. Picone” (IAC – CNR) in

50 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 Figure 1: Formation of cuprite and brochantite layers over the copper boundary.

Rome, we are currently investigating formed, two moles of cuprite and one Fermi data is shown in Figure 2. It must this modelling approach, and we have mole of SO2 are required. Swelling is be observed that a greater cuprite thick- proposed a differential model with two expected also in this case, see Figure 1. ness is due to the model calibration free boundaries describing the evolu- which is obtained under high Relative tion of corrosion products of bronze, a To calibrate this model, in collaboration Humidity and a very high SO2 concen- copper tin alloy (88-12%). with the Chemistry Department of the tration; environmental conditions have University Roma “La Sapienza”, spe- a lower concentration of SO2 and a This model includes important features cific laboratory experiments have been variable Relative Humidity. such as swelling of the products of cor- performed, in a climatic chamber and rosion, which depends on the structure atmosphere control (Erichsen Mod. In the future, our aim is to develop stan- of the matter, and the total wasting of 519/AUTO), with 40o Celsius of tem- dard predictive software based on our bronze. For simplicity, as a first step, we perature, 100% of Relative Humidity, model, as an aid for monitoring outdoor have considered only copper corrosion and 200 ppm of SO2. Under these con- and indoor monuments. product development. To describe ditions, the growth of corrosion prod- copper corrosion evolution, we con- ucts (cuprite and brochantite) after 40 sider, on the most internal layer, the hours was about 13.2μm, with a transformation of copper in cuprite by standard deviation of 2.4μm. The model Link: oxidation, which involves the transfor- was thus calibrated using these results. http://www.iac.rm.cnr.it/~natalini mation of two moles of copper in one In addition, using environmental data mole of cuprite (Cu2O), accompanied (SO2, temperature, pressure and Please contact: by a volume change caused by the humidity) collected in Piazzale Fermi in Roberto Natalini changed molar volume. The cuprite Rome (Italy) during 2005, a simulation Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo external layer reacts with SO2 in the was performed to assess the formation “M. Picone”, Italy presence of water and oxygen, thus for of corrosion products under these con- Tel: +39 06 88470257 every mole of brochantite that is ditions. The simulation with Piazzale E-mail: [email protected]

Figure 2: Simulation of Cuprite and Brochantite formation with P. Fermi (Rome) data.

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 51 Research and Innovation

Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of a Nanoparticle at Atomic Resolution

by Joost Batenburg and Sandra van Aert

ResearchersfromCWI,theUniversityofAntwerp,ETH Zürich,andtheSwissFederalLaboratoriesforMaterials ScienceandTechnology,havedevelopedthefirst Figure 1: Visualization of the three-dimensional structure of a silver practicalmethodtoreconstructthe3Dpositionofall nanoparticle at an atomic level. Sophisticated measurement and atomsinsideananoparticle.Theirbreakthrough reconstruction techniques are applied to images obtained with one of requiredacombinationofstatisticalimagemodelling, the most powerful electron microscopes in the world. discretetomography,andstate-of-the-artelectron microscopy.Theresearch,publishedinNatureon The researchers applied their algorithms to images of a silver 2February2011,willallowresearcherstobetter nanoparticle obtained with one of the world’s most powerful understandthethree-dimensionalstructureof electron microscopes. By imaging this particle from different materials.Thisisimportantforthedevelopmentofnew directions, two dimensional projection images were acquired catalysts,solarcellsandbetterLEDlighting. at atomic resolution. To use these images for discrete tomog- raphy, an intermediate step was required: atom counting. This project employed the use of tomography, an imaging Sandra van Aert from the University of Antwerp applied technique which deals with the reconstruction of 3D images sophisticated statistical models to count the integral number of from a series of 2D projection images, acquired from a range atoms in each projected column. The resulting discrete projec- of angles. The image reconstruction task is then modelled as tions were then used as input for a discrete tomography algo- a mathematical inverse problem, which can be solved using rithm, resulting in the atomic resolution 3D reconstruction. techniques from analysis and linear algebra. In the case of atomic resolution imaging, this problem is highly chal- International team lenging, as only a few projection images – typically less than The research was performed at the EMAT laboratory four - can be recorded. As a result, the reconstruction (Electron Microscopy for Materials Science) of the problem is highly ambiguous: there exist many different University of Antwerp, under the guidance of Sandra Van atomic configurations sharing the same projections. Aert and Gustaaf Van Tendeloo, and at CWI in Amsterdam, under the guidance of Joost Batenburg. The research team The key to solving the reconstruction problem lies in the also included Rolf Erni and Marta Rossell, scientists from incorporation of prior knowledge within the reconstruction Switzerland who acquired experimental images with a proto- algorithm. In a crystal, the atoms are not randomly distrib- type of the new Qu-Ant-EM electron microscope which has uted: they closely follow a regular lattice structure. been in use in Antwerp since June 2010. Conventional tomography methods model the image as a greylevel distribution, corresponding to the density of the The research conducted by this team pushes the limits of our material. At the atomic level, nature is actually discrete: an perception and will promote further research on nanoparti- atom is either absent or present at a particular location, but cles. The ability to use new algorithms to visualize the three- there cannot be half an atom. Joost Batenburg, researcher at dimensional structure of nanoparticles at the atomic level CWI, applied new combinatorial reconstruction algorithms will open up new possibilities in the development of innova- for discrete tomography, which take into account prior tive materials with fascinating and revolutionary properties. knowledge of the lattice structure and the discrete nature of One will be able, for example, to acquire all necessary atoms. Using this knowledge, just a few projections are often knowledge to understand the structure and activity of cata- sufficient to accurately reconstruct the atomic configuration lysts and to design optimal catalysts, for specific uses, for of a nanoparticle. instance in the automobile industry. Furthermore, knowledge about the atomic structure holds promises for the develop- Nanoparticles are structures consisting of only a few atoms up ment of more efficient solar cells, computer chips, versatile to thousands of atoms, ranging in size from one to 100 lasers and brighter LED lighting. nanometres. Nanoparticles often have physical, chemical, or biological properties that are very different from the same Links: materials at larger scale. For example, gold changes colour http://homepages.cwi.nl/~kbatenbu/ from yellow to red as the size of the gold particles is reduced http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09741 to a few nanometres. The often unexpected properties depend on the exact three-dimensional configuration of all atoms Please contact: within the nanoparticle. It has, therefore, been a long-term Joost Batenburg, CWI Amsterdam, Netherlands challenge to zoom down to the atomic level. For the first time, Tel: +31 20 592 4037 scientists have managed to make this dream come true . E-mail: [email protected]

52 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 estimator of location and scatter for multivariate data. Robust Methods Reflecting the most recent developments of robust statistics, the method possesses a high breakdown point, which is a sta- for Image Processing tistical measure of sensitivity against outliers or noise in the data. This technique has desirable properties including in Anthropology robustness to noise, reliability for a high dimension of the data, computational stability, clear interpretation and model and Biomedicine selection. by Jan Kalina The motivation for the anthropological research is a distant aim to examine the connection between the size and shape of Commonmethodsof2Dimageanalysisin facial features and the genetic code. The basic task of anthro- anthropologicalandbiomedicalapplicationsaretoo pometrics is person identification, which can be interpreted as sensitivetothepresenceofartifactsoroutliersinthe a statistical problem of analysis of variability. Namely, we data.Westudyrobuststatisticalmethodssuitablefor work in face recognition, comparing the image of a person high-dimensionalinformationprocessing.Theresults with images in a database and the inter-person variability acquiredfrompracticalanthropologicalandbiomedical must be differentiated from intra-person variability. tasksdemonstratethebenefitsofmethodsbasedon Anthropometric measures in the face allow also the diagnosis robuststatistics. of genetic diseases based on a craniofacial dysmorphism.

Standard methods of image analysis applied to forensic In the task of face detection, each face must be automatically anthropology or biomedicine (for example, analysis of med- localized in the image. This is again a problem of machine ical ultrasound images) are not robust. Typical procedures learning, because each part of an image is classified as a face start with a dimension reduction and feature extraction and or a non-face. We carry out the face detection by detecting proceed to a method (for example neural symmetrical areas within an image. Symmetry is measured networks, support vector machines or Bayesian classifica- between two neighbouring rectangular areas in the images tion). Robust mathematical statistics demonstrate that these using a new robust correlation coefficient, which down- methods are non-robust in terms of their vulnerability to out- weights regions of the face violating the symmetry. It also lying values. Individual classifiers are often combined with yields reliable results in face localization for faces which are ad hoc procedures to create complex black box systems with not entirely symmetrical. Further, we have developed a robust nonparametric discrimination technique allowing Figure 1: Forensic location of facial landmarks, which are biologically defined anthropology aims to points of correspondence in each face. The use of optimal identify crime victims. templates in face detection ensures the results to be resistant The superprojection to severe noise in the image, occlusion of the face, illumina- compares the skull tion changes, asymmetric hair style or rotation of the face. with 2D photographs of missing persons. The results of 2D image analysis of faces also have applica- tions to forensic anthropology. In this area we intend to implement a 3D image analysis method for forensic analysis of skulls and faces. Geometric morphometrics based on a certain point of landmarks is commonly used to compare a skull of a crime victim with a 2D image of the face of a missing person. Here we propose to objectify the specifica- tion of landmarks. For the sake of morphometric analysis, we will perform an optimization procedure involving the com- numerous parameters, rendering impossible a simple inter- putation of weights for individual landmarks for a training pretation. The noise plays a highly influential role in the set of skulls and images of the face. This will enable us to information extraction from images and the methods are also maximize the discrimination between the image correspon- sensitive to two-dimensional artifacts or to specific assump- ding to the particular skull and all other images. Robust sta- tions which cannot be verified. tistical methods are underlaid by profound theoretical rea- soning and yield very promising and reliable results in In the Centre of Biomedical Informatics (project of the anthropological and biomedical applications. Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic) we propose robust approaches for 2D image Link: http://www.euromise.org analysis. Robust statistical methods bring new insights to image analysis problems as well as being very appropriate to Please contact: meet their specific requirements. We apply new robust statis- Jan Kalina, Centre of Biomedical Informatics, Institute of tical methods and algorithms to the analysis of real data in Computer Science, Academy of Sciences of the Czech anthropology and biomedicine. One of the aims is a Republic / CRCIM denoising of 2D images, for which we propose a robust filter Tel.: +420 266053099 based on local smoothing by robust regression. Further, we E-mail: [email protected] propose a robust machine learning procedure based on a new

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 53 Research and Innovation

accrued to IR researchers. The internal rate of return (IRR) DIRECT: the first Prototype was estimated to be over 250% for extrapolated benefits and of the PROMISE over 130% for unextrapolated benefits”. Large-scale evaluation campaigns produce a huge amount of Evaluation Infrastructure extremely valuable scientific data which provides the foun- dations for subsequent scientific production and system for Information Retrieval development and constitutes an essential reference for litera- ture in the field. This data is also economically valuable, due Experimental Evaluation the considerable effort devoted to its production: the NIST study estimates in about 30 million dollars the overall invest- by Nicola Ferro ment in TREC.

PROMISEisanetworkofexcellencefocusedonthe Nevertheless, little attention has been paid over the years to experimentalevaluationofmultilingualandmultimedia modelling, managing, curating and accessing the scientific informationaccesssystems.Oneofitskey data produced by evaluation initiatives, despite the fact that contributionsistodevelopandprovideanopen the importance of scientific data in general has been high- evaluationinfrastructure,whichbringsautomationto lighted by many institutional organizations, such the theevaluationprocess,managing,curating,and European Commission, the US National Scientific Board, providingaccesstothescientificdataproducedduring and the Australian Working Group on Data for Science. theevaluationactivities. Objectives Experimental evaluation is a key activity for driving and sup- Our goal is to deliver a unified infrastructure and environ- the development of multilingual and multimedia ment for data, knowledge, tools, methodologies, and the user information access systems. It is an essential part of the scien- community in order to advance the experimental evaluation tific process since using shared data sets and evaluation sce- of complex multimedia and multilingual information sys- narios systems can be compared, performances can be better tems. The evaluation infrastructure will: understood, and progress can be pursued and demonstrated. • manage and provide access to the scientific data produced during evaluation activities; Large-scale evaluation initiatives, such as Text REtrieval • support the organization of evaluation campaigns; Conference (TREC) in the United States, the Cross- • increase the automation of the evaluation process; Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) in Europe, and the NII- • provide component-based evaluation; NACSIS Test Collection for IR Systems (NTCIR) in Asia, • foster the usage and understanding of the scientific data; contribute significantly to advancements in research and industrial innovation in the information retrieval sector, and A user-centered design approach will be adopted involving to the building of strong research communities. A study con- the different stakeholders, eg scientists, evaluation campaign ducted by NIST reports that “for every $1 that NIST and its organizers, system developers, students, in the development partners invested in TREC, at least $3.35 to $5.07 in benefits of the infrastructure.

DIRECT: the First Prototype The outcome of this effort is the Dis- tributed Information Retrieval Evalua- tion Campaign Tool (DIRECT), which • introduces a conceptual model of the information space of an evaluation campaign; • provides metadata describing the sci- entific data managed, to enable shar- ing and re-use; • adopts a unique identification mecha- nism allowing explicit citation of and easy access to the scientific data; • manages all the aspects of an evalua- tion campaign, and provides tools for statistical analyses and reporting of results.

DIRECT has been developed and tested in the course of the annual CLEF evalu- ation campaigns since 2005. It now manages and provides online access to much of the data produced over ten Figure 1: DIRECT provides tools for statistical analyses and reporting of results years of CLEF. It also aims at improving

54 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 interaction with the experimental results by researchers and system developers. We are now investigating the adoption of Potential Cell-phone innovative devices, such as the iPad, which can allow for a natural and easy interaction with the experimental results and Dangers: Latest Studies scientific data in real time. by Harry Rudin Next Steps PROMISE is a three year project beginning in September Theresultsoftwostudies---actuallycollectionsof 2010. It will issue releases of the evaluation infrastructure studies---havebeenpublishedjustrecently.Theseare with new functionalities, such data annotation and visual theEurope-wideInterphonestudyandtheSwiss analytic techniques, annually. In order to achieve a better NationalResearchProgramNRP57,Entitled“Non- representation, interaction, and understanding of experi- IonizingRadiation–HealthandEnvironment”.Infew mental results, we are investigating how best to exploit words,neitherhasidentifiedmeasurablehealth human-computer interaction and the principles of visual dangersarisingfromcell-phoneuse---butboth analytics. This will be the topic of the PROMISE Winter recommendfurtherstudyandcaution. School Information Retrieval meets Information Visualization, which will be held in January 2012, Zinal, Swiss NRP 57 Study Switzerland. The Swiss National Science Foundation financed eleven research projects in four categories: dosimetry and exposure The information retrieval area is now beginning to explore assessment, laboratory studies and epidemiology, cell and exploit the scientific data produced during the evalua- biology, and risk perception. The projects were carried out tion studies by making use of methods typical of the data- over a three-year period. base and knowledge management areas. The aim of the Data infrastructurEs for Supporting Information Retrieval In the first category, a study was made to discover the major Evaluation (DESIRE 2011) workshop, co-located with source of non-ionizing radiation. There are many wireless CIKM 2011, the 20th ACM Conference on Information and devices that radiate but, based on an extensive set of week- Knowledge Management, in October 2011, Glasgow, UK is long measurements made in the city of Basel, the major to bring together experts from the three communities in source of radiation remains the cell phone. How much radia- order to discuss the challenges involved. The intention of tion depends on the transmission system used (UMTS radi- the organizers is to produce a roadmap and a set of initial ates less than the older GSM) and using a headset reduces the best practices guiding the development of evaluation infra- exposure by a factor of ten. A surprising and upsetting result structures to manage experimental data. of the study is that the modern induction stove causes very strong electromagnetic fields and could well be a substantial danger for pregnant women and their unborn children. This Links: is particularly true for professional cooks. PROMISE: http://www.promise-noe.eu/ In the second category, it was clearly shown that the pulse- DIRECT: http://direct.dei.unipd.it/ modulated radio-frequency fields emitted by cell phones do affect the human brain. First, these induce short-term effects DEMO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDsXDCUPkiM observable in the brain’s electro-encephalogram. Some effects continued after the exposed person went to sleep but CLEF 2011: http://www.clef2011.org/ these effects did not have a sleep-disturbing result. Changes in the cerebral blood circulation and heart rate were also CLEF: http://www.clef-campaign.org/ observed but these were small and no negative effect on a person’s well being was observed. DESIRE 2011 Workshop: http://www.promise-noe.eu/events/desire-2011/ In the cell-biology category, DNA fragmentation in mam- malian cells was shown. The frequency of the radiation was PROMISE Winter School 2012: not cell-phone frequencies but normal household 50 Hz. The http://www.promise-noe.eu/events/winter-school-2012/ observed effect on cellular processes was very weak and pre- sumably of no medical consequence. TREC Economic Impact Study: http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/2010.economic.impact.pdf As to results of the risk-perception study, the Swiss public accepts wide-spread cell-phone use but at the same time is Please contact: somewhat apprehensive of the radiation coming from base Nicola Ferro, University of Padua, Italy stations. Some 5 % believe that they are hypersensitive to E-mail: [email protected] electromagnetic fields and suffer health problems as a result.

While the NRP 57 studies found no direct evidence for health problems caused by cell-phone radiation, the recommenda- tion is that research be continued, particularly as cell-phone usage increases and technology changes so rapidly. The first link below is a summary of the findings.

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 55 Research and Innovation

Interphone Study And, what biases are introduced when a person has learned The Interphone study is the largest study yet of potential cell- that he or she actually has a tumor? phone dangers, having been carried out in thirteen European countries and having identified some 6500 cancer patients. If there is a weak conclusion, it is that prolonged high usage The patients were selected on the basis of four different kinds may cause a brain glioma. The glioma develops on the side of brain tumors. The cell-phone use of these 6500 patients of the head where the cell phone is held. High usage is was compared with the cell-phone use of a similar number of defined as a total accumulation of more than 1640 hours of healthy individuals. Many individual (country-based) studies cell-phone use. had been published earlier but only recently have the results of all the studies been pooled together in the hopes of pro- Again, quoting from the conclusion of the study, “… biases viding greater statistical certainty. and errors limit the strength of the conclusions we can draw from these analyses and prevent a causal interpretation” The results are confusing, a likely result of imprecision (quoted from the third link below). Clearly there is a need for inherent in the interviews used to estimate cell-phone usage. further study as usage --- particularly among young people -- - is growing and there is a fear that adolescents may be more sensitive. These worries may be balanced by newer technolo- gies with reduced radiation.

The second link below is a very readable summary of the results of the Interphone study --- but in German. The third link was written in English by the study’s coordinator and gives details of the study.

Conclusions What has been learned? Non-ionizing radiation from cell phones does have an effect on our bodily processes; whether this has an effect on our health remains unclear. There is a weak indication that heavy cell-phone use may cause a brain glioma but this is by no means certain. Until further results become available, we might take advantage of having learned that the use of a headset reduces radiation delivered to the head by a factor of ten.

Links: http://www.nfp57.ch Non-Ionizing Radiation – Health and Environment; Synthe- Smartphone apps can monitor the phone’s radiation level and sis report (in English) recommend whether it’s at a safe level to talk or not. http://www.forummobil.ch/files/webcontent/documents/fre- quentia_10_d.pdf G. Duerrenberger’s analysis of the Interphone study (in Cancer patients were identified and interviewed to learn of German) their cell-phone use. For comparison, non-patients from a similar environment were identified and also questioned In http://www.forummobil.ch/de/suche about cell-phone usage. The study was based on 30 to 60 “Brain tumor risk in relation to mobile telephone use: year olds. results of the INTERPHONE international case–control study” (in English) If one casually looks at the results one could conclude that for very high usage, the chance of a brain glioma (one of the Please contact: four tumor types investigated) resulting from cell-phone Harry Rudin radiation is significant. Casually looking at other usage cate- Swiss Editor for ERCIM News gories, one could conclude that for some types of tumors, [email protected] moderate cell-phone use has a protective effect! This is hard to explain on a medical basis. These observations and the results of a calculation of the statistical confidence interval (which show relatively little confidence in the results) weaken the study’s conclusions. Quoting from the report ref- erenced below: ”The possible effects of long-term, heavy use of mobile phones require further investigation.”

Probably the difficulties are a result of the interviews: How accurate are a person’s recollection of the intensity of his or her cell-phone use two, five, or even ten years in the past?

56 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 Crowdsourcing Culture with a Twist by Pär Hansson

InStockholm,Sweden,thereisanewinitiativewhich lookstobringanewwayofcreatingandfunding culturalprojects.Theideaistoletcitizensinfluencethe distributionoffundingforculturalprojects.Theconcept combinesprivatemoneywithpublicmoneytofundthe creationofculture,usinganewtechnicalplatform.

In an applied research project, called CrowdCulture, which was founded around the question of “How would we dis- tribute cultural funding if we invented that concept today”, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) is working together with a communication company in devel- Screenshot of the CrowdCulture application. oping new technology to combine private and public funding for the creation of a new culture. In Sweden today, most cul- viduals support - are always changing, the leveraging effect is tural investments follow a top-down political logic. One of course also always changing in this highly dynamic real- larger aim of this project is to engage more people to con- time system. Those projects that meet their budgetary targets tribute and participate in the cultural development, and con- within a given time frame are awarded the requested funding. sequently delegate decision-making power to a broader public with different references and quality criteria. Encouraging new cultural initiatives In addition to funding distribution, the service allows a paying We are also addressing new ideas around different crowd- member to suggest a new project they would like to work on sourcing concepts and techniques, knowing that crowd- and submit it to the crowd to decide if it is suitable. The site sourcing and working with experts are equally qualitative also allows for, and is largely marketed by, connections to the methods in many fields - take for example the much talked social web, as well as in-site crowd participation mechanisms. about article confirming similar standards of quality of Wikipedia and The Encyclopedia Britannica. Furthermore, Used by the City of Stockholm we know that micro funding is a great tool in creating local The project ran a successful three-month beta test during the empowerment and initiating important processes of change; fall of 2010, attracting 500 members using only the social it was not without reason Muhammad Yunus got the Nobel web for awareness. During the test a combination of public, prize for his practice with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. private, and industry funds were distributed, with the City of Furthermore, we believe that arts and culture respond, in Stockholm as the largest contributor. The success of this trial their own ways, to the circumstances in which society finds has caused the City of Stockholm to, as of April 2011, con- itself. Considering this, we think that funding mechanisms tinue distribution of cultural funding through this system. should respond to society’s circumstances as well, instead of In this first stage mostly more conventional crowd participa- to the logics of top politicians only. tion techniques were used while examining different crowd- sourcing mechanisms. The continuation of this work applied Private symbolic funding steers larger sums to a similar ‘democracy in action’ area would also look at the The core of the CrowdCulture project is a web based plat- relationship between crowd wisdom and the rest of the dem- form which allows people to invest small monthly sums in ocratic mix, as well as community support for producers. any available cultural projects they choose. Currently, the This very young area has caused a lot of discussion in the system allows an individual to contribute as little as €5 per democratic arena in general the last couple of years, high- month. An individual person’s investment is spread out over lighted by the quite diverse opinions in the media articles this time, whereby funding trickles out per time unit according to project alone has generated. which cultural project the giver choses to support at the moment. However, as a twist on crowdfunding, the partici- The CrowdCulture technology is being developed by the pating individuals’ support for different projects will have a Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), in coopera- leveraging effect, diverting a potentially much larger sum tion with concept developer Fabel Kommunikation AB, sup- from public funding or other contributing organizations to ported by the City of Stockholm, and the Swedish innovation the supported projects. agency VINNOVA.

At any time there can be any number of “passive” con- Links: tributing organizations and companies, which donate larger http://www.crowdculture.se sums to the system. This funding is not directed towards par- http://www.sics.se/projects/crowdculture ticular projects, but can be tagged to support certain cate- gories of cultural projects. Since a lot of the parameters of the Please contact: system -such as the number of individuals, number of proj- Pär Hansson, SICS, Sweden ects, the amount of contributed money, which project the indi- E-mail: [email protected]

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 57 Research and Innovation

Building a Building for Nanotechnology

by Harry Rudin

On17May,IBMResearchandtheETH/Z(SwissFederal InstituteofTechnologyatZurich)openedtheBinnigand Figure 1: Clean-room facility at the Binning and Rohrer RohrerNanotechnologyCenteronthecampusofthe Nanotechnology Center (courtesy of IBM Research - Zurich). IBMZurichResearchLaboratoryinRueschlikon, Switzerland.Thenameandthelocationarewellchosen controlling and observing their experiments remotely. Their asitwasherethatGerdBinningandHeinrichRohrer presence in the room where the investigation takes place inventedtheSTM(ScanningTunnelingMicroscope) would severely disturb the experiment in any case. some30yearsago.TheywereawardedtheNobelPrize forPhysicsforthisin1986.Thetimingwasalsoideal The nanotechnology laboratory facilities will mainly be used astheopeninghelpsIBMcelebrateitscentennial. by researchers from IBM and the ETH although other institu- tions will also have use of the laboratory. Both the ETH and Binnig and Rohrer’s invention was effectively the birth of IBM have already produced exciting results in the nanotech- today’s nanotechnology science. There was earlier, rather nology world. For example there has been work going on at scattered work at the nano-scale (ie, at dimensions in the the ETH on field-effect based on carbon nanotubes order of 10-9 meters) but the STM and later the AFM (Atom- and investigations of the use of graphene as a basis for quan- ic Force Microscope, invented by Binnig in 1985) provided tum computers. At the critical turning point and effectively laid the foundation IBM there has been for what is now the field of nanotechnology. work on spintronics, using the magnetic Nanotechnology has to do with structures with a dimension moment of electrons of less than 100 nanometers --- about 1000 times smaller for computing, as well than a strand of human hair. But working at this dimension as on transistors based requires rather special conditions. In fact a new building on nanowires and inte- with some 6000m2 floorspace at a cost of roughly 70 million gration of photonics Euro was necessary to house the required equipment and for communication researchers. This includes almost 1000m2 of clean-room within integrated-cir- facilities of the sort required for the production of the most cuit chips. The new modern integrated circuits. The facilities range from class facilities will facilitate 100 (ISO 5) to class 10000 (ISO 7). The first means that further work on these there are less than 100 particles larger than 0.5 micrometer topics. in a cubic foot of air in the clean-room, some 10,000 times less than in the atmosphere we are used to. Temperature and Looking to the future, humidity are carefully regulated. we know that materi- Figure 2: View of stabilized platforms als behave differently for nanotechnology investigations The planning and construction of the “noise-free” laborato- at the atomic level (courtesy of IBM Research - Zurich). ries have advanced the state of the art. Unique in the world compared to their and requiring a design task that was a substantial research behavior at the bulk effort in itself, these laboratories are necessary for the material level, creating various unique phenomena. The extraordinary investigations that are planned. The IBM Center will explore these phenomena. From IBM’s point of Research designer of these facilities, Emanuel Loertscher, view, a major question is what comes after the . calls the laboratories “ultra-isolated.” The foundation rests on Nanowires have the advantage of very small power con- the bedrock below the laboratory. To further minimize the sumption. New display and storage technologies are also vibration there are active and passive techniques which were exciting topics. Bringing two groups of top-notch developed to isolate the 30- to 70-ton platforms on which the researchers together in a uniquely suited facility will cer- experiments will take place. This isolation reduces vibration tainly produce exciting results over the coming years, not from the rest of the laboratory, the nearby super-highway, and only for nanoelectronics but also for medicine and means nearby railroad tunnel so that it remains below 500 nanome- for environmentally friendly production. ters/second. As far as acoustic noise is concerned, noise from outside the laboratories is reduced by roughly 60 db. Special Links: shielding and dynamic electromagnetic cancelling fields http://www.zurich.ibm.com/nanocenter/ reduce the alternating electro-magnetic fields to a value http://www.zurich.ibm.com/pdf/nanocenter/Nano_Center_F below 5 nano-Teslas and the static fields to a value below 20 act_Sheet.pdf nano-Teslas. Changes in temperature are kept below 0.1 C. per hour. The isolation is so complete that it is almost unnerv- Please contact: ing for a researcher to be in such an enclosure; the researchers Harry Rudin, Swiss editor for ERCIM News, Switzerland sit outside of these laboratories in a less severe environment, E-mail: [email protected]

58 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 Events

4th Summer School participants. Breakout sessions value-added and associated services. enhanced the dialogue and exchange of Clients of NetEdge include Vodafone on Network and ideas, while cutting edge security issues and Idea Cellular, major mobile phone were collected before the event through service providers in India. Thus, Information Security publicly accessible fora and channelled Abhishek brought with him to Budapest into the discussions. a network of Indian ICT operators. In (NIS’11) addition, Abhishek is a mobile value- Summaries of these interactive sessions added-services, applications and con- “The Challenge of the Changing Risk were compiled and distributed during tent consultant with rich experience in Landscape” was the special theme of the the event. operations, project management and 4th Summer School jointly organised by consulting roles in the telecom/IT The European Network and Information Link: domains. His wide range of experience Security Agency (ENISA) and FORTH http://www.nis-summer-school.eu and ability to engage with a variety of on 27 June - 1 July 2011, Crete, Greece. research priorities as well as his exten- Please contact: sive network and ability to dissemi- The Changing Risk Landscape refers to Ioannis Askoxylakis nate/act as a focal point made him an the dynamics, dependencies and com- FORTH-ICS, Greece ideal Indian partner at the event. plexity inherent to Information E-mail: [email protected] Technology. In this context, the Abhishek was accompanied over the changing security “ecosystem” is one of course of the event by Ashok Kar, Infra the main challenges of Information Technologies, one of the European Security. The relevant stakeholders need project partners of Euro-India SPIRIT to improve reaction, and extend collabo- and Tom Williamson, ERCIM, project ration and information exchange in coordinator of Euro-India SPIRIT. order to achieve timely and effective responses to the posed challenges. This The delegation arrived at the Hungexpo seems to be the only option for centre in Budapest with a packed Information Security in the continuous facilitating an Indian agenda for the two days’ sessions. arms race between defense strategies Meetings covered a complete cross-sec- and offense attempts. Delegate’s tion of attendees both European and non-European, private industry, aca- ENISA is dedicated to promoting a cul- Participation demics, National Contact Points ture of security in Europe that will (NCPs) and Commission officials. improve the ability of EU member states at the ICT Proposers’ to respond to cyber-attacks. It does so, Abhishek was also taken to sessions of by pursuing a strategy of mitigating Day 2011 particular interest, eg cloud computing, risks through awareness, studies, reports international cooperation and mobility. and position papers on current NIS mat- by Tom Williamson These proved very stimulating and ters. Towards this objective, ENISA and useful for Abhishek, and a number of ICS-FORTH brought together in this The goal of EU-funded Euro-India potential link-ups were identified for summer school a distinguished faculty SPIRIT project managed by ERCIM, is follow-up. The delegation also attended from around the world with the purpose to formulate between the EU and Indian the session on FP7 rules and proposal- of identifying current trends, threats and Information and Communication making to give a flavour of the adminis- opportunities against the background of Technology (ICT) stakeholders a mutu- trative requirements involved. recent advances on NIS measures and ally beneficial research and innovation policies. agenda which can be taken up through While the results of such an event , from specific bilateral initiatives. With this the perspective of the Euro-India Recognising the multi-dimensional specific goal in mind, Euro-India SPIRIT SPIRIT project, will be judged over facets and intricacies causing changes in invited the Indian ICT expert Abhishek time in links maintained and stregth- the information risks landscape, an array Sharma to the ICT Proposers’ Day at ened, the initial aim of familiarisation of lectures covered a variety of key Budapest in May 2011. The aim was to with ICT proposals was more than met aspects on policy, economic, legal and facilitate an enabling environment for over the course of the event and it is research matters. The audience included Abhishek to familiarise himself with the hoped that Abhishek will be amongst policy makers from EU member states variety of ICT areas in which collabora- the first of many future Indian attendees and EU institutions, decision makers tion is possible, to learn about the tech- and proposers in the years to come. from industry and members of the aca- nical and administrative aspects of being demic community. involved in FP7 projects, and to network Link: with prospective project partners. http://www.euroindia-ict.org/ By going through a natural evolution cycle, but also by adopting current Abhishek Sharma is the Chairman and Please contact: trends in networking and exchange of CEO of NetEdge Tele-Solutions, an Tom Williamson knowledge, this year’s Summer School Indian SME which develops mobile ERCIM office helped increasing interaction among applications and provides telecom E-mail: [email protected]

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 59 Events

Call for Participation Workshop on Integration of AMI and sion. The event is held under the AAL Platforms in the Future Internet patronage of the Polish Presidency of AmI–11 - Privacy Public Platform Initiative the European Union. This workshop will focus on the chal- International Joint lenges of integrating Ambient Projects, organisations and companies Intelligence (AmI) and Ambient are invited to present their initiatives and Conference on Assisted Living (AAL) platforms with contribute to the shaping of future the Future Internet Privacy Public models for research and innovation. Ambient Intelligence Partnership (FI-PPP) initiative. In this respect the workshop provides informa- The Summit discussions will feed into Amsterdam, The Netherlands, tion on concrete means to engage with the Policy Manifesto on Integrated 16-18 Noveber 2006 the FI PPP future calls and experiments, Action on the Gender Dimension in either as a user or as a co-developer.The Research & Innovation, to be presented Ambient Intelligence (AmI) represents a following topics will be discussed: to the European Commission and other vision of the future in which products • Architecture of an FI platform. Chal- key policy actors. Please contribute your and services will be responsive to the lenges from an FI viewpoint views to the Manifesto by completing user context, offering a rich variety of • Architecture of existing and to come the public consultation on Gender and applications in the professional and con- AmI / AAL platforms. Challenges Innovation. sumer domains. AmI combines concepts from an AmI/AAL viewpoint of ubiquitous technology, intelligent • How can integration take place? More information: systems and advanced user interface What are the hurdles? http://www.gender-summit.eu/ design putting the humans in the center • What are the means of experimenta- of technological developments. tion? Can AAL be a usage area for the Future Internet? Starting as the European Symposium on • What is the impact of evaluation? Ambient Intelligence in 2003 the confer- How can we move towards a Euro- ence has grown to an annual interna- pean digital signle market? New Technologies and tional event that brings together • Identification of measures and instru- researchers and serves as a forum to dis- ments Cultural Heritage at cuss the latest trends and solutions. • Actions. vIEW Conference 2011 Following the publication of early sce- Participants at the workshop will include narios on Ambient Intelligence in 2001 both members of the AmI/AAL platform Torino, Italy, 25-28 October 2011 by the European Commission’s Joint community, members of the FI commu- Research Centre, the theme of AmI-11 nity and policy makers. “New Technologies applied to Cultural will focus on the “The Road Ahead, Heritage” is one of the main topics of Shaping the Next 10 years”. More information: the 12th edition of the VIEW http://www.ami-11.org/ Conference, to be held on 25-28 Workshops http://www.trialog.com/AALworkshop.html October 2011 in Torino. The VIEW AmI-11 hosts a series of workshops: conference is the premiere international • Aesthetic Intelligence: Designing event in Italy on Computer Graphics, Smart and Beautiful Architectural Call for Participation Interactive Techniques, Digital Cinema, Spaces 3D Animation, Gaming and VFX. • Human-Centered Design of European Gender Smart/Ambient Environments and The section “New Technologies and Services: Models and Tools for Tasks Summit Cultural Heritage” seeks to promote, on Migratability a high quality standard, the application • Interactive Human Behavior Analysis Brussels, 8-9 November 2011 of the new technologies in view of val- in Open or Public Spaces orizing cultural heritage, intended in the • Workshop on User Interaction genSET - gender in science, the vast sense, assuming initiatives in the Methods for Elderly, People with European Science Foundation (ESF) research and promoting education. Dementia and the European Cooperation in • Empowering and integrating senior Science and Technology (COST) invite Researchers and representatives from citizens with virtual coaching you to the first European Gender companies, universities, museums or • Integration of AMI and AAL Summit in Brussels . schools who have an innovative idea to platforms in the Future Internet (FI) present and want to have a talk at VIEW Platform initiative For the first time, this Summit will about New Technologies and Cultural • Ambient Gaming bring together key stakeholders from Heritage are invited to submit an • 2nd Int. Workshop on Human research, industry, publications, innova- abstract before 31st August to the Behavior Understanding: Inducing tion management and policy to discuss address [email protected]. Behavioral Change how European innovation and research • Privacy, Trust and Interaction in the systems can benefit from more effective More information: Internet of Things. mainstreaming of the gender dimen- http://viewconference.it/

60 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 Advertisement Call for Participation SERENE 2011 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering for Resilient Systems

Geneva, Switzerland, 29-30 September , 2011

An unprecedented level of complexity of modern software makes it difficult to ensure its resilience – the ability of a system to reliably deliver its services even when undergoing change. Yet we are observing an increasingly pervasive use of software in such critical infrastruc- tures as transportation, health care, energy production etc. Such a trend could lead to devastating accidents unless the research community develops powerful methods for assuring resilience of soft- ware-intensive systems. The SERENE 2011 workshop provides a forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange reports on advances in all areas relevant to this challenge, such as: • Modelling of resilience properties: Call for Participation statistics for imprecise data, extreme formal & semi-formal techniques value modelling, quantile regression and • Requirements, software engineering 4th International semiparametric methods, model valida- & re-engineering for resilience tion, functional data analysis, Bayesian • Verification and validation of Conference of the methods, optimization heuristics in esti- resilient systems mation and modelling, computational • Resilience prediction and experimen- ERCIM Working Group econometrics, quantitative finance, sta- tal measurement tistical signal extraction and filtering, • Error, fault and exception handling in on Computing & small area estimation, latent variable the software life-cycle and structural equation models, mixture • Frameworks, patterns and software Statistics models, matrix computations in statis- architectures for resilience tics, time series modelling and computa- • Resilience at run-time: metadata, London, 17-19 December 2011 tion, optimal design algorithms and mechanisms, reasoning and adaptation computational statistics for clinical • Engineering of self-healing autonomic The 4th International Conference of the research. systems ERCIM Working Group on Computing • Quantitative approaches to ensuring & Statistics will take place at the Senate Keynote speakers resilience House, University of London, 17-19 Keynote speakers include: • CASE tools for developing resilient December 2011, jointly with the 5th • Peter M. Robinson, London School systems. CSDA International Conference on of Economics, UK Computational and Financial • Alastair Young, Imperial College, The workshop is organized by the Econometrics (CFE’11). The confer- London, UK ERCIM Working Group “Software ence is organized by the London School • Stephen G Walker, University of Engineering for Resilient Systems of Economics, Queen Mary, University Kent, Canterbury, UK (SERENE) and supported by the of London, and Birkbeck University of • Andrew Harvey, University of Cam- Laboratory for Advanced Software London. bridge, UK Systems, University of Luxembourg, • Dick van Dijk, Erasmus School of and the EU-funded Deploy project . Topics Economics, The Netherland. Conference topics include robust More information: methods, statistical algorithms and soft- More information: http://serene2011.uni.lu/ ware, high-dimensional data analysis, http://www.cfe-csda.org/ercim11/

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 61 Events

Call for Participation Call for Participation SOFSEM is the ideal conference for dis- cussions, for establishing personal con- MUSCLE Workshop SOfSEM 2012 tacts with colleagues, and for exchanging ideas. SOFSEM is also on Computational 38th International well-known for its familiar and inspiring atmosphere and is especially suited for Intelligence Conference on young computer scientists.

for Multimedia Current Trends in Invited speakers As usual at SOFSEM, a very distin- Understanding Theory and Practice guished feature of the SOFSEM 2012 will be the higher number of invited Pisa, Italy, 13-15 December 2011 of Computer Science speakers: Foundations of Computer Science The purpose of this workshop, organised Spindleruv Mlyn, Czech Republic, Track: by the ERCIM MUSCLE Working January 21–27, 2012 • Yuri Gurevich (University of Michi- Group, is to provide an international gan and , USA): forum to present and discuss current SOFSEM (SOFtware SEMinar) is the “What’s an Algorithm?” trends and future directions in computa- annual international winter conference • Giuseppe F. Italiano (University of tional intelligence for multimedia under- devoted to the theory and practice of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy) standing. The workshop also aims at fos- computer science. Its aim is to present the tering the creation of a permanent net- latest developments in research for pro- Special event: Session on Turing work of scientists and practitioners for fessionals from academia and industry, Machines: an easy and immediate access to people, working in leading areas of computer sci- • Felipe Cucker (City University of data and ideas. The scientific program, ence. Proceedings containing the invited Hong Kong, Hong Kong) organized in a single-session format, and contributed papers will be published • Peter van Emde Boas (University of consists of invited lectures, contributed in the series Lecture Notes in Computer Amsterdam, The Netherlands): “Tur- talks, and poster presentations. Science by Springer Verlag. ing Machines for Dummies” • Jiri Wiedermann (Institute of Com- The workshop will feature high-quality The SOFSEM program consists of puter Science, Academy of Sciences, presentations addressing multimedia Invited Talks by prominent researchers, Czech Republic) processing and understanding method- Contributed Talks selected by the ologies, ranging from statistical, neural, Program Committee from submitted Software & Web Engineering Track: evolutionary methods to mixed reality papers, Poster Session and the Student • Paul De Bra (Eindhoven University and multisensor interaction, as well as a Research Forum. SOFSEM is organized of Technology, The Netherlands): “A variety of applications, in the areas of in plenary and parallel tracks, giving a Fully Generic Approach for Realiz- public services, transport/mobility, aids unique opportunity to obtain an excel- ing the Adaptive Web” to disabled people, process control and lent overview of the selected research • Pavel Zezula (Masaryk University in diagnosis, remote sensing, and beyond. areas. All tracks are devoted to original Brno, Czech Republic): “Multi Fea- Active participation of graduate stu- research and leading developments. ture Indexing Network (MUFIN) - dents is strongly encouraged. Similarity Search Platform for many By tradition, one track of SOFSEM is Applications” Topics include, but are not limited to: devoted to Foundations of Computer multisensor system, multimodal Science. SOFSEM 2012 offers in addi- , Security, and Verification analysis, crossmodal data analysis and tion three, outstanding tracks: Software Track: clustering, mixed-reality applications, & Web Engineering, Cryptography, • Orna Kupferman (Hebrew University activity and object detection and recog- Security, and Verification, and Artificial in Jerusalem, Israel): “Recent Chal- nition, text and speech recognition, Intelligence. lenges and Ideas in Temporal Synthe- multimedia labeling, semantic annota- sis” tion, and metadata, multimodal Special Event: • Krzysztof Pietrzak (Cryptology indexing and searching in very large Session on Turing Machines Research Group, CWI): “Efficient data-bases, case studies. In memory of , whose 100th Cryptography from Hard Learning anniversary is celebrated in 2012, Problems” Invited Speakers SOFSEM 2012 will host a session on • Bulent Sankur, Bogazici University, Turing machines. The session will con- Artificial Intelligence Turkey sist of invited and contributed talks on • Kevin Warwick (University of Read- • Sanni Siltanen, VTT, Finland Turing machines as the basic model of ing, United Kingdom): “Not Another computability and complexity, and Look at the Turing Test!” The workshop is co-sponsored by CNR reporting new developments related to • Roberto Navigli (Sapienza University and INRIA. models inspired by, for example, of Rome, Italy) biology and physics. SOFSEM 2012 is More information: among the official Centenary Events of More information: http://muscle.isti.cnr.it/pisaworkshop2011/ The Alan Turing Year. http://www.sofsem.cz

62 ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 In Brief

Marie–Paule Cani Jos Baeten Winner of the Eurographics New General Director of CWI n e v o h d

Prof. Dr. Jos C.M. Baeten n

Outstanding Technical i E

, e /

will be the new general U T

: e c r

director of CWI in u

Contributions Award 2011 o Amsterdam. The General S Board of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) confirmed his appointment on Monday 6 June. On 1 October 2011 Baeten succeeds n o i t a i

c the current general o s s a

s c

i director, Prof. Dr. Jan h p a r g

o Karel Lenstra, who will r u E

© continue working at CWI as a senior researcher until his retirement in 2012. Baeten obtained a PhD in mathematics in Marie-Paule Cani received the Eurographics Outstanding 1985. Since 1991, he has been affiliated with the Eindhoven Technical Contributions Award 2011. This internationally University of Technology as Professor of Theoretical recognized distinction, given each year to an individual in Computer Science, and since 2010 as Professor of Systems computer graphics to highlight some outstanding technical Engineering. The Board of CWI describes Baeten as a very achievement, rewards her work in implicit modelling, ani- prominent researcher, with an excellent understanding of both mation and interactive shape design. Marie-Paule Cani, a mathematics and computer science, and extensive experience university professor in Grenoble, leads the EVASION in attracting external funding. He has been successful in con- research team, a joint INRIA Grenoble and Jean Kuntzmann tract research and valorization and is a very experienced man- laboratory team, which is affiliated with the French National ager. Jos Baeten will succeed Jan Karel Lenstra as CWI repre- Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the universities sentative for ERCIM. of Grenoble. The Eurographics award is given for major contributions to the field of computer graphics that are both technologically advanced and creative. This is the case in Marie-Paule Cani’s work on implicit surfaces and multireso- Twenty-five Years .nl Domain lution deformable models. For example, she has developed several solutions for animation of nature scenes, and more In April 2011, the 25th birthday of the .nl domain was cele- recently, for animating characters’ hair and clothing. Her brated. On 25 April 1986,.nl was registered by CWI, the work in creating interactive forms is also highly innovative. Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam. It was one Based on theoretical concepts, her research has been applied of the first country domains in the world. Six days later, Piet in several domains: animated games and films, training sim- Beertema, at that time system administrator, registered the ulators for surgical operations, industrial virtual proto- first internet domain in the Netherlands: cwi.nl, which is still typing, etc. in use by CWI.

Beertema was given the authority over the .nl domain and ERCIM Activity Report 2010 managed it for ten years. In 1996, authority was handed over to Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland (SIDN), The recently published co-founded by CWI. Currently, SIDN has administrated ca. ERCIM annual report 5.5 million unique domain names of which 4.2 million are 2010 provides the active. Not only is this one of the highest numbers world- opportunity to review wide, the Netherlands also ranks second in the number of ERCIM’s activities and domains registered per inhabitant. SIDN celebrated 25 years gain insight into ERCIM’s of .nl with the publication of a magazine and an anniversary structure and organisation, website, http://de25jaarvan.nl (in Dutch). projects, working groups, members, etc. We hope The first open internet connection between Europe and the you enjoy reading it and United States originated from CWI as well. On 17 November obtain from it ideas or 1988, a short e-mail correspondence confirmed the connec- stimulation. Perhaps it will tion of CWI to NSFnet, an American academic computer net- inspire you to participate work and the forerunner of today’s internet. In these early in ERCIM’s activities! days, most of the transatlantic internet traffic had to go through CWI. http://www.ercim.eu/publications/annual-report http://www.godfatherof.nl/

ERCIM NEWS 86 July 2011 63 ERCIM – the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics is an organisation dedicated to the advancement of European research and development, in information technology and applied mathematics. Its national member institutions aim to foster collaborative work within the European research community and to increase co-operation with European industry.

ERCIM is the European Host of the World Wide Web Consortium.

Austrian Association for Research in IT Norwegian University of Science and Technology c/o Österreichische Computer Gesellschaft Faculty of Information Technology, Mathematics and Wollzeile 1-3, A-1010 Wien, Austria Electrical Engineering, N 7491 Trondheim, Norway http://www.aarit.at/ http://www.ntnu.no/

Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, ISTI-CNR Portuguese ERCIM Grouping Area della Ricerca CNR di Pisa, c/o INESC Porto, Campus da FEUP, Via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, nº 378, http://www.isti.cnr.it/ 4200-465 Porto, Portugal

Czech Research Consortium     Polish Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics for Informatics and Mathematics Wydział Matematyki, Informatyki i Mechaniki, FI MU, Botanicka 68a, CZ-602 00 Brno, Czech Republic  Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, ul. Banacha 2, 02-097 Warszawa, Poland http://www.utia.cas.cz/CRCIM/home.html http://www.plercim.pl/     

Science and Technology Facilities Council, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Science Park 123, Harwell Science and Innovation Campus NL-1098 XG Amsterdam, The Netherlands Chilton, Didcot, Oxfordshire OX11 0QX, United Kingdom http://www.cwi.nl/ http://www.scitech.ac.uk/

Fonds National de la Recherche Spanish Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, 6, rue Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, B.P. 1777 D3301, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, L-1017 Luxembourg-Kirchberg Campus de Montegancedo s/n, http://www.fnr.lu/ 28660 Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain, http://www.sparcim.es/

Swedish Institute of Computer Science FWO FNRS Box 1263, Egmontstraat 5 rue d’Egmont 5 SE-164 29 Kista, Sweden B-1000 Brussels, Belgium B-1000 Brussels, Belgium http://www.sics.se/ http://www.fwo.be/ http://www.fnrs.be/

Swiss Association for Research in Information Technology Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas c/o Professor Daniel Thalmann, EPFL-VRlab, Institute of Computer Science CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland P.O. Box 1385, GR-71110 Heraklion, Crete, Greece http://www.sarit.ch/ http://www.ics.forth.gr/ FORTH Fraunhofer ICT Group Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Friedrichstr. 60 Számítástechnikai és Automatizálási Kutató Intézet 10117 Berlin, Germany P.O. Box 63, H-1518 Budapest, Hungary http://www.iuk.fraunhofer.de/ http://www.sztaki.hu/

University of Cyprus Institut National de Recherche en Informatique P.O. Box 20537 et en Automatique 1678 Nicosia, Cyprus B.P. 105, F-78153 Le Chesnay, France http://www.cs.ucy.ac.cy/ http://www.inria.fr/

Irish Universities Association Technical Research Centre of Finland c/o School of Computing, Dublin City University PO Box 1000 Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland FIN-02044 VTT, Finland http://ercim.computing.dcu.ie/ http://www.vtt.fi/

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