Presentation at the H2020-CEF Infoday, 16 January 2014 http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/news/information-and-networking-days-h2020-work-programme-2014-2015-connecting-europe-facility

1. Antoine Isaac
Information and networking days
H2020 / Connecting Europe Facility, Jan 15-16, 2014

2. Europe’s platform to access cultural heritage
Currently
30M objects

3. Built on descriptive metadata
from a broad, heterogeneous network
Audiovisual
collections
National Aggregators
Regional Aggregators
Archives
Thematic collections
Libraries
Musées
Lausannois
Culture.frThe
European
Library
APEX
European Film
Gateway Europeana Fashion
2,300 galleries, museums, archives and libraries

4. Accessing items from 36 countries
top 16
Portal interface in 31 languages
Metadata in 33 languages

5. Serving Europe’s citizens
5M visits on Europeana.eu
7M Facebook impressions
API use…

6. Content (digital objects on the site of the provider)
Metadata (descriptive object information)
Public Domain
Creative Commons
Licenses
Rights reserved
Orphan work
Facilitating re-use on the legal side
CC

7. Facilitating re-use on the language side?
Our network needs automatic translation tools
to address information needs all over Europe

8. Gathering/linking existing multilingual data

9. Related projects applying NLP tools
E.g., The PATHS project has developed techniques to enrich English
and Spanish collections
1)Identification of key entities
2)Detection of (typed) similarities between objects, using metadata
3)“Background links” to external resources such as Wikipedia
4)Classification of object against a hierarchy of topic
Applying these techniques to other languages would require work
1)requires language-specific tools (PoS tagging, lemmatization)
2)is straightforward to apply to new languages
3)requires language-specific tools
4)depends on (3) and on translation of some topics
http://www.paths-project.eu/eng/Resources/Semantic-Enrichment-of-Cultural-Heritage-content-in-PATHS

10. Language challenges for Digital Libraries
 Typical queries are very short
Average < 2 terms
 Identification of query language is not easy, even manually
39% of queries may belong to several languages
 Plenty of named entities
60% of queries are for persons & places
Not only is it hard for queries: the same issues apply
to the descriptive metadata
Studies by Humboldt University on Europeana and The European Library
http://www.clef-initiative.eu/documents/71612/86374/CLEF2010wn-LogCLEF-StillerEt2010.pdf

11. Language processing issues at the scale of
Europe

12. Thank you!
Antoine Isaac
antoine.isaac@europeana.eu
@EuropeanaEU

13. Europeana’s vision and mission
 We believe in making cultural heritage openly
accessible in a digital way, to promote the
exchange of ideas and information
 We want to be a catalyst for change in the world of
cultural heritage