PATHS at the EAA conference 2013

Tools for exploring Digital Cultural Heritage Spaces

Kate Fernie, Jillian Griffiths,, Mark Stevenson, Paul Clough, Eneko Agirre, Aitor Soroa, Stein Runar

Bergheim, Mark Hall and Konstantinos Chandrinos

EAA 2013, New Digital Developments in Heritage Management and Research

PATHS: project basics

•  A STREP funded under the FP7 programme •  36 month project - 1/1/2011 to 31/12/2013 •  6 partners in 5 countries

•  University of Sheffield •  Universidad del Pais Vasco •  i-sieve technologies Ltd •  Asplan Viak Internet Ltd •  MDR Partners •  (Alinari 24 Ora Spa)

http://www.paths-project.eu

Introduction

Large quantities of digital cultural heritage material have become available online yet digital libraries are often limited to a simple keyword search


Introducing paths


We’re introducing the idea of paths into digital library collections They can be created by experts or general users.

This is not a new idea – some examples are Walden’s Paths, Trailmeme, Timelines, museum exhibitions

We think we can do more


Research areas: •  Information access: Methods for exploring and

navigating digital cultural heritage collections, including paths, topic maps, tag-clouds, hierarchical concept structures and recommender services.

•  Natural Language Processing: analysing item metadata to improve indexing, enable use of ontologies, and generating links between items in the collection and with external background material (e.g. Wikipedia articles).

User-centred development

Users

What do people want from digital libraries / how might they use paths?

Gather user requirements and behaviours

Develop prototype system

Evaluate and test system with potential end users

http://www.paths-project.eu/eng/Resources/User-Requirements-Analysis

Technology


•  PATHS has a flexible modular architecture consisting of web-services, data storage and end-user interfaces

•  Natural language processing of the metadata allows search capabilities to be enhanced

•  A hybrid model combines RDF/SPARQL with RDB/SQL to deliver performance and robustness

•  Web services support users, path creation and editing, querying, interacting with topic hierarchies and a SolrProxy service.

End user interface


•  Based on the Web Services and data stores •  The content is from Europeana, enriched by the

project

Analysing and enriching metadata

•  Initial analysis -> Part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, identification of dates, events, multiple word phrases

•  Thematic organisation -> analysis of subjects and themes to produce a taxonomy with item clusters

•  Intra-collection links -> the similarity between pairs of items in the collection is computed

•  Links to Wikipedia -> using Wikipedia Miner •  Links to websites -> using Sentiment Analysis


Demo

http://explorer.paths-project.eu/

Published Paths

Paths can be created by experts or any registered user

Overview

Paths can be linear or include branches And they can intersect with other paths

Path following

Description by path creator

Continue on this path

Starting to explore

Going off the path and exploring the links

Search


Browsing using the thesaurus


Visualising the collection as a tag cloud


Same taxonomy, different view

Collection as a topic map

Same taxonomy different view

Browsing and finding items

All 3 exploration methods - thesaurus, tag cloud or topic map – find the same set of items

Creating paths

Users who have registered and logged into the system can add items to their workspace and create their own paths

Workspace

You can add items to your workspace until you’re ready to start creating a path

Editing Paths

You can edit one of your existing paths by going to your profile page

Editing paths

This is an unpublished path that I’m still working on

Drag and drop from workspace

I’ve created a new branch by dragging and dropping an item from the workspace

Editing nodes

Users can add their own descriptions of the item nodes on a path which can include links to external resources, notes or exercises

Adding text nodes

Users can also add text only nodes to a path

Editing the path metadata

Each path has metadata which can include keywords, duration, a cover image, description Paths are hidden until you decide to publish

Preview


User scenarios

Paths

Classroom activities

Leisure users

Local historians

Curated collections

Researchers


User study

“Imagine you are a student who has been asked to create a path as part of a university assignment. You have been asked to use primary source materials to create a mini online exhibition suitable for a target group within the general public and/or school visitor categories. Your goal is to introduce a historical or art-focussed topic in a popular, accessible way, and to encourage further use and exploration of cultural heritage resources.”


Exploitation

•  We’re currently in the final stage of our second development cycle

•  The PATHS API is available for testing •  Intended to be suitable for implementation in any

digital library system

•  Market study and exploitation plan this autumn – some initial findings •  Potential demand for stand-alone components •  Also for consultancy services


[email protected]

Thanks for your attention!

http://www.paths-project.eu

Twitter @PATHS_project

Education

PATHS at the EAA conference 2013