P. Doorenbosch
Public and researchers (in the humanities) seem to be highly interested in huge amounts of cultural and historical data on the Internet. Custodians of the cultural heritage collections are currently digitizing their collections on a relatively large scale, to fulfill this need. Contemporary history, art and culture become born digitally in growing amounts. The objects in cultural heritage (primary sources) are mostly rather limited in its semantic accessibility (poor metadata); relations between the objects are seldom known at least not described in a formal way. The meaning of most objects is ambiguous, hidden, amorphous and period-dependent. The days, in which a heritage institute had only analogue collections, the custodian could pretend he was the only person capable of guiding visitors through it. In the digital world his role has become more and more obsolete. His human intellect and his personal way of approaching things are definitely no more sufficient to satisfy the needs of his audience. Beside that, his authority has vanished. In heritage world there is not only a lot of data, they are interesting and important above that: for quality of live and for a better understanding of our society and the humane existence. The great challenge for the heritage sector will be: how can information science add value to a better interaction between the digital past and the user, and how can the heritage world involve computer science in its problems.
The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, together with computer science institutions and memory institutions, has established a research program to connect computer science and digitized cultural heritage. It is called CATCH (Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage). The program will run for six years. It has started with six core projects in three research-lines:
interoperability through metadata
knowledge enrichment through semantic annotations
personalization trough navigation
Besides these six projects, a call for an other four projects is published, and we hope to gain funding for an other call somewhere in autumn.
In my presentation, I will give an outline of the CATCH program and its first six core projects. I will place the program in relation to an other big project in the Netherlands, MultimediaN (Multimedia Netherlands). Multimedian deals with different application fields. Besides the heritage sector, these are the public security, the media, and the cross sector area. Where Catch is demand-driven - questions from the memory sector are at the base of the program - MultimediaN is technology-driven, with the heritage sector as one of its application fields. In both programs there will be a tension between the scientific purpose of the knowledge institutions and the demand for applicable results in the heritage sector.
In addition to this I will give a short overview of some areas, where computer science could add to solutions for ‘problems’ in the digital heritage.
|