BRICKS Onthology approach “Emergent Semantics”

F. S. Nucci

Roma, 6 Luglio 2004

Project Identity Card

• Project Acronym: BRICKS - Building Resources for

Integrated Cultural Knowledge Services

• Co-ordinator Organisation: Engineering

• Project instruments: Integrated Project

• Thematic area: Digital Libraries Services

• Duration: 42 months (important results from the

second year)

• Budget: 12,2 Mega Euro

European Collective Cultural Memory

• Great part of data related to cultural contents belong to the public sector information: they must be part of the European electronic marketplace.

• Moreover the European memory is trans-national, not local based. All these data composed now the European Cultural Memory, that is fully distributed wide European countries.

• Let take an example: an Early Cycladic Art (c. 3200 – 2000 B.C.) was produced in ancient Greek fifty centuries ago, but was used as inspiration by an Italian artist (Modigliani) living in Paris, five millenniums later.

More examples...

Gothic is not French or Germany, it is European

Roman age archaeology is not Italian, it is European

All these are bridges to unify and windows to open to unify and develop the European Digital Memory

Scenario• During the last two millenniums the European People has

developed a lot of Cultural Objects (art-facts, piece of art, paints, sculpture, archaeological sites, architecture site, and so on)

• In the last century a lot of information and content on Cultural heritage have been produced and stored in textual, magnetic and electronic formats (movie, book, database, libraries, ecc.)

• In the last decade many projects have been conducted, delivering many services and SW to manage these data. Now it is time to build a common platform to unify and preserve the access to all these data.

Goal

• DEM is an open source architecture where share knowledge and content

• DEM is reuse of other project results by modern SW technologies

• DEM is interoperability, not just for Content, but also for the services (with Web Services approach)

... also an integration of services to develop a sizeable integrated platform for

DIGITAL EUROPEAN MEMORYDIGITAL EUROPEAN MEMORY

Objectives

"Build an open scalable

infrastructure

“Develop the right value

added services”

"Use an effective

sustainability model"

• Expandability • Scalability• Availability• Graduality of engagement

• Interoperability

Value added Services to:• Access to digital Culture• Management of Culture • Creation of Culture• Editions of digital Text

• Aggregation of the open community

• Sustainability plan• Definition of the organisational structure

Mission: Design, develop and maintenance a services oriented shared European Digital Memory

Objectives

First objective (what we are building): an open, distributed and safe infrastructure

Second objective (how we can use): four main examples of using to demonstrate the value creation for the users have been identified.

Third objective (who will pay): define the right business model to sustain in the future

“Greek Temple” metaphor

• In order to illustrate these three areas and account for their interrelationships, throughout this proposal the well-known metaphor of the Greek temple will be used:

– the infrastructure area will be equated to the foundations of the temple;

– the application services area will be equated to the pillars of the temple;

– the sustainability area will be equated to the roof of the temple.

“Greek Temple”

the infrastructure area

the application services

the sustainability area

BRICKS

+ REVENUE

- COST

Innovation directo

r

leverage

The “bricks”

Test beds

• Four main application scenarios have been defined together within the Bricks Constituency and user groups

– Access to Culture, reconstruction of Knowledge

– Management of Culture: Small and Medium Museums

– Creation of Culture: living memory

– Digital Texts: scriptorium

• Other pillars could be added using BRICKS standard infrastructure in a “Plug and Play” way

Application scenarios

• Reconstruction of Knowledge– Target users: Researchers and professionals, schools,

Cultural associations, University Professors, exhibit curators

– Application goal: Design a Pilot to integrate the access of distributed knowledge on Digital Cultural Content

– Business Model: B2E

• Small and Medium Museums– Application goal: to improve and distributed knowledge and

good practices on Museum and Culture Management

– Target users: Small and Medium Museums

– Business Model: B2B

Application scenarios

• Living Memory– Application goal: to facilitate interaction between

users/visitors and Multimedia Art Objects in order to create a living European memory

– Target users: general public, visitors of real andvirtual exhibitions; Business Model: B2C

• Scriptorium– Application goal: Facilitate fruition and management of

Distributed Digital Texts– Target users: Scientific professionals: Universities, Cultural

research centres, libraries and archives; Business model: B2B

BRICKS and semantic web

• BRICKS infrastructure aims to be:

– Distributed with “Peer to Peer” approach

– Open to future aggregations with an Open source philosophy

– interoperable for content and services (with a Web Service approach)

• For all these reasons large attention will be dedicated to the semantic web standard (as RDF(S), OWL), working in collaboration with Minerva Project

Emergent Semantics

• BRICKS will use many onthologies to describe specific Cultural Contents. In the same time BRICKS aims to manage different agreements between different onthologies

• In this way will be possible to create co-operation areas. These area will co-operate each others to share contents and services.

• BRICKS sees global semantics as an evolutionary process, emerging from local interactions and agreements in order to overcome linguistic and ontological barriers and realise a shared knowledge space.

Key words

• Semantic interoperability should be considered as an

incremental process, starting from local agreements.

• Peer-to-Peer paradigm is well suited to this approach,

because it can support the autonomy and flexibility

characteristic

• Onthology will be used in BRICKS also to define and to

describe SW services in order to make possible their

interoperability

Some conclusion

• Trough the Network of Excellence and the participation of some BRICKS member CNR-ISTI, Athens University, Florence University, FHG-IPSI), in them will be possible start an exchange with the academic research word and with the research centres in this field. For instance: .

– Collaboration with ICS-FORTH of Cretha (CIDOC)

– Collaboration with UKOLN -www.ukoln.org

• BRICKS member is also Losanna Polytechnic EPFL, quite important for the definition of emergent semantic paradigm.