1. A European Tower of Babel? Semantic technology and multilingual issues in Europeana. Prof. Dr. Stefan Gradmann Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin / School of Library and Information Science [email_address]

3. Languages and Interpretation

4. Towards a Semantic Europeana

5. Towards a Multilingual Europeana

6. Semantics: For Whom?

7. An Example

8. Europeana's Babel Potential

9. On how not to end up as a European Tower of Babel

10. A Very Old Story: Genesis XI, 1-9

11. A very Old Story: Genesis XI, 1-9

12. A Very Old Story: Genesis XI, 1-9

13. A Very Old Story: Genesis XI, 1-9

14. After the End of the Very Old Story

15. And the Reason for the End of the Very Old Story

16. Re: the Reason for the End of the Very Old Story

18. The second loss of Paradise was a loss of semiological innocence.

19. From that moment on, things did not simply bear names anymore but were referenced by signs as part of complex significant systems: languages!

20. Likewise, communication turned into a controlled misunderstanding.

21. This also was the hour of birth of hermeneutics, the science of interpretation.

22. The fall of the tower of Babel triggered a long and ongoing quest for semantic interoperability.

23. Europeana is part of this quest.

24. Europeana Semantic Interoperability and Multilingual Issues

29. Linguistic interoperability is a political and a cultural asset.

30. The Interoperability Abstraction Layer Cake Concrete Abstract

32. Interaction with data providers “Aggregators and other content providers need to provide identifiers, metadata files, vocabularies in SKOS form, links to semantic nodes , licensing and rights information and access to the original digital objects.”

33. Terminology mapping “The work to turn this [collection of Europeana terminologies] in a 'European Ontology' and more specifically the mapping of these concept schemes cannot be done in the context of Europeana alone but must be made be part of the wider EC research agenda. However, Europeana will have to contain instruments that can be used to produce such mappings and to promote best practices. ” -> Europena.Connect WP1

34. Make Europeana “ a network of inter-operating object surrogates enabling semantics based object discovery and use .” All in http://tinyurl.com/EuropeanaSpecsD2-5

35. Europeana is not Yet Another Digital Libray

36. Document Objects, Metadata and Semantic Networks

37. Contextualisation of Europeana Object Representations

39. Vocabulary and concept alignment

40. Create links between semantic contextualisation layer and object representations

41. Automate related workflow

42. Specify semantic search and interface functionalit

45. Browsing via a common multilingual ontology mapping onto versions for each language. Invest in SKOSification!

48. Hence a close connection between WP2 and WP1!

51. Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, Portugese, Swedish

53. Europeana enabling automated semantic operations over large cultural heritage corpora creates entirely new opportunities for the digital humanities!

54. An Example (1)

55. An Example (2)

56. An Example (3)

57. An Example (4)

58. An Example (5)

59. An Example (6)

60. An Example (7)

61. An Example (8)

62. Datacloud

65. Europeana has a strong political component being part of the European Commission's i2010 Lisbon Agenda

68. -> There definitely is a lot of 'Babel' inside Europeana …

69. … but that doesn't necessarily imply a Babel scenario for Europeana as a whole!

72. -> Build strong functional unique selling points on multilingualism and semantic interoperability!

73. Conclusion: from 'Connecting' to 'Thinking' A semantically enabled Europeana also enables an interesting transition from Man acts as if he were the shaper and master of language, while it is language which remains mistress of man. When this relation of dominance is inverted, man succumbs to strange contrivances. Language then becomes a means of expression. (Martin Heidegger) Thank you for your patience and attention!