Grants

AI4Europeana proposes the development of the AI4Culture platform: an online capacity building hub for the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in the Cultural Heritage (CH) sector. The platform offers access to a pool of AI-related resources: (i) a set of deployable and reusable AI tools; (ii) open labelled datasets amenable for training and testing AI models; and (iii) capacity building materials. The AI4Culture platform will be populated with an initial suite of AI tools, offered as deployable software packages as well as services. To this end, a number of existing digital components will be customised, interfaced, and packaged, so that they can be readily used by CH institutions in the context of representative and real-life application scenarios: multilingual text recognition in scanned documents; multilingual subtitles generation and validation; enrichment with information extracted from images and semantic linking; and machine translation for CH metadata. Furthermore, said components will be interoperable with the Europeana Core Service platform. The project also processes and makes available under open licences a range of datasets with human-produced or -validated annotations to various CH-related resources, including handwritten documents, images, and CH metadata. This way, AI4Culture boosts the availability of relevant materials from (and for) Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) to be used for training, validating and evaluating AI tools. Finally, the project will produce a multifarious range of materials for upskilling, including Wikis, tutorials, step-by-step guides and best practices, as well as a series of capacity building events with hand-on sessions and a hackathon. With this comprehensive offering, the project has a clear and strong value proposition for the CH sector, helping it to overcome the barriers that have prevented a broad adoption of AI technologies so far and thereby innovating the Data Space for CH.

Partners

1. STICHTING EUROPEANA 

2. DATOPTRON I.K.E. 

3. FONDAZIONE BRUNO KESSLER 

4. TRANSLATED SRL 

5. CROSSLANG NV

6. DATABLE BV

7. PANGEANIC-B. I. EUROPA SLU

8. KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN

9. EUROPEAN FASHION HERITAGE ASSOCIATION

10. STICHTING NEDERLANDS INSTITUUT VOORBEELD EN GELUID

11. AIT AUSTRIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY GMBH

CRAFTED brings together a diverse consortium composed of experienced Europeana aggregators - European Fashion Heritage Association7, EUscreen8, MUSEU-HUB9, and the Greek national aggregator SearchCulture.gr10, 15 museums and archives from 8 European countries, eight of them involved directly in the consortium, and seven involved through the Greek national aggregator (ten of these institutions are providing content to Europeana for the first time), the Europeana Foundation, and experienced technology partners with the aim to aggregate new high-quality datasets on Europeana, provide novel technologies to enrich collections and carry out public engagement and dissemination activities to promote crafts heritage. The project sets out to achieve six specific objectives:

- Increase the amount of high-quality, multimodal content on Europeana.

- Define and deploy an innovative human-in-the-loop methodology and accompanying toolset for the optimized automatic enrichment of large amounts of CH metadata

- Enhance interest in European crafts and rejuvenation of craft practices.

- Support the takeup of AI and crowdsourcing technologies in the Cultural Heritage sector.

Partners:

1. National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)-established in Greece

2. Michael Culture Association (MCA) - established in Belgium

3. Stichting Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (NISV) - established in Netherlands

4. European Fashion Heritage Association (EFHA) - established in Italy

5. Stichting Europeana (EF) - established in Netherlands

6. AG Culturele Instellingen Antwerpen/Erfgoed (AG CIA) - established in Belgium

7. DATABLE BV (DATABLE) - established in Belgium

8. Université du Luxembourg (UdL) - established in Luxembourg

9. MINISTERE DE LA CULTURE ET DE LA COMMUNICATION - Mobilier national et manufactures nationales des Gobelins, de Beauvais et de la Savonnerie (MCC) - established in France

10. Museum of Arts and Crafts (MUO) - established in Croatia

11. STOWARZYSZENIE MIEDZYNARODOWE CENTRUM ZARZADZANIA INFORMACJA (ICIMSS) - established in Poland

12. Fondazione Museo del Tessuto di Prato (FMTP) - established in Italy

13. Etablissement public Paris Musées (PARIS MUSEES) - established in France

14. NATIONAL DOCUMENTATION CENTER – EKT (ETHNIKO KENTRO TEKMIRIOSIS KAI ILEKTRONIKOU PERIECHOMENOU) (EKT) - established in Greece

This Action aims to build connections between the Europeana and the Automated Translation Digital Service Infrastructures (DSI) for the benefit of both:

i to improve usability of heritage resources by enriching datasets on Europeana as well as datasets provided by cultural institutions with multilingual metadata; and

ii to significantly enrich the language resources available through the ELRC-SHARE repository by adding millions of records describing cultural heritage items.

The Action will deliver to ELRC-SHARE at least 10 million metadata records to be sourced from the Europeana API, processed and tagged. The resources will include records with data in parallel languages and, where not possible, monolingual records, covering the 24 EU official languages. All provided resources will have a free reuse license (CC0).

Moreover, the Action will train and deploy automated translation engines customised to serve the needs of the Cultural Heritage domain. The engines will be delivered to the European Language Grid (ELG) and will become part of an end-to-end pipeline and a fully-fledged supporting set of tools that connects the two DSIs. The pipeline will be used to source metadata records from Europeana and cultural heritage content providers, to process and translate them to English, evaluate the results, insert the translations as enrichments to cultural heritage metadata records, manage and deliver them to the Europeana platform or to individual Cultural Heritage Institutions’ platforms.

As a result, the provided tools and platforms will be made openly available in order to enable cultural heritage institutions, service providers and other interested parties to reuse the individual tools under different use cases.

The Europeana Translate workflow will be applied to translate at least 25 million Europeana metadata records to be published back to the Europeana Core service platform.

Partners:

1. National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)

2. European Fashion Heritage Association (EFHA) - established in Italy

3. Stichting Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (NISV) - established in Netherlands

4. Pangeanic SL (Pangeanic) - established in Spain

5. Stichting Europeana (EF) - established in Netherlands

6. Michael Culture Association (MCA) - established in Belgium

OLA is a 2-year Erasmus+ European project (2021-2023) coordinated by CNR-IRPPS that, following the crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemics, aims at giving an impetus to “open educational resources” and “open educational practices”, as an opportunity to reduce the digital divide in the European educational context, building a more inclusive society.

Open educational resources – intended as free digital educational resources, collaboratively developed by teacher networks with other social actors – already exist, but are still a fragmented reality, not enough widespread and valued at institutional level. OLA project aims at promoting their development and diffusion by means of: MOOC courses for teachers; creation of guidelines about open educational resources for teachers and editors; participative building of an open access online platform usable by teachers to develop and spread multimedia educational scenarios.

By the end of the project, 80 interdisciplinary scenarios related to STEAM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics) will be developed, 50 of which will be tested in the 5 partner countries: Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Romania and Spain.

A central issue transversal to the project is paying attention to recognizing stereotypes – starting from, but not limited to gender – and values implicitly conveyed by school textbooks and multimedia online resources, so as to promote a wider concept of “digital competences”, including not only strictly technological competences, but also the capability of using online platforms and information sources critically and responsibly, as a premise for exercising a conscious and informed citizenship.

Partners: 

• Greece: National Technical University of Athens
                1° Peiramatiko Gymnasio Athinas of Athens
• Italy: CNR-IRPPS (international coordinator of the project)
            Istituto Comprensivo Carducci-King of Casoria
• Cyprus: University of Cyprus
• Romania: Scoala Gimnaziala Mircea Eliade of Craiova
• Spain: Centro de Formación Somorrostro of Muskiz

STIRData Action proposes the use of Linked Data and semantic technologies as the means to overcome the technical barriers that hamper the reuse of open data, namely, poor quality and limited availability of Open Data. In particular, the Action seeks to assist data providers through a set of data specifications, guidelines, and an accompanying harmonisation toolset for streamlining and facilitating the process of enriching and publishing company data as Linked Data.

An online platform for searching, navigating, synthetically analysing, and visualising company-related open data content coming from different sources in a homogeneous way will also be developed, supporting a number of cross-border and cross-domain reuse scenarios. These sources will include company registries, sources discoverable via the European Data Portal (EDP) and other open data platforms. The offered functionalities will be exposed via an open Application Programming Interface (API), so that they can be reused by other digital public services or applications developed by data and ICT companies.

In particular, during the project lifetime, data referring to at least 1.5 million companies from at least five different countries will be published as Linked Data and become searchable and navigable via the STIRData platform. The enhanced datasets will be also published to the national open data portals of Greece (data.gov.gr), Norway (data.norge.no), and Czechia (data.gov.cz) so that they can be harvested by the EDP.

The overall STIRData approach, technical tools, and online services will be of a general purpose and can be uptaken to facilitate harmonisation and reusability of open data in other domains.

Partners

1. National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)

2. UNIVERZITA KARLOVA (CU) - established in Czech Republic

3. Masaryk University (MUNI) - established in Czech Republic

4. Registerenheten i Brønnøysund (BRREG) - established in Norway

5. DIGITALISERINGSDIREKTORATET (Digdir) - established in Norway

6. General Secretariat of Digital Governance and Simplification of Procedures of Ministry of Digital Governance (MINDIGITAL) - established in Greece

7. Athens chamber of commerce and industry (ACCI) - established in Greece

8. THINKCODE LTD (ThinkCode) - established in Cyprus

The project encourages citizen science in cultural heritage through the application of crowdsourcing and co-creation tools to some of Europe’s largest open digital collections. It contributes to the notion of European citizenship by enabling stakeholder communities to jointly take responsibility for their heritage advocating an open approach to otherness and a European community spirit surmounting regional and national differences. CitizenHeritage will address researchers in the field of Cultural Heritage, including PhD and Master students from different relevant research fields (Cultural Studies, (Art) History, Memory studies, but also Digital Humanities, Cultural Economics and software engineering) to train them in inducing, governing and leveraging on citizen participation, digital crowdsourcing and co-creation. These methods and activities will teach students how to take sustainable and economic viable decisions when engaging citizens. In order to optimize efficiency, CitizenHeritage will map and critically assess current practices with regards to their educational value and user friendliness. But the project will also develop and test new methods and activities, making use of large European digital collections that help to highlight the relevance and power of cultural diversity.

Partners

1. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)

2. Photoconsortium International Consortium for Photographic Heritage (Italy)

3. National Technical University of Athens (Greece)

4. Web2Learn (Greece)

5. Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (Netherlands)

The CrowdSchool project moves from this situation to underline the importance of human and social capital as articulated in the aims of Erasmus+. The project intends to propose a new model for:

- enhancing schools with new interactive methods for increasing the creative thinking skills of students, taking benefit of the potential present in the digital repositories of cultural institutions.

 - creating an innovative tool for applying STEAM Education (i.e. a combination of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) as an access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking.

Partners

1. Michael Culture (Belgium)

2. National Technical University of Athens (Greece)

3. Steps (Italy)

4. European Fashion Heritage Association (Italy)

5. Stowarzyszenie Miedzynarodone Centrum (Poland)

6. L. Artistico Liceo F. Arcangeli (Italy)

7. Zespol Szkol Drogowo-Geodezyjnych i Licealnych im. Augusta Witkowskiego w Jaroslawiu (Poland)

8. Ecole Elementaire Polangis (France)

9. Calliope Education (Spain)