Finding the Way Out of an ArcticCloud!
I and a lot of other people, especially from Sweden, are finalising a bid for a EC-funded project that is going to be called ArcticCloud.The bid is to funding under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) which:
Aims at stimulating innovation and competitiveness through the wider uptake and best use of ICT by citizens, governments and businesses.
ArcticCloud is a use-driven ‘Best Practice Network’ for the development and use of services. It is centred round a generalised ’storytelling’ paradigm and will improve the usability of Europeana. It has an initial, trans-disciplinary, focus on Polar and Arctic cultural heritage found in European organisations, but will be extended to cover a wider range of subjects and geographical spread. It will:
- Create a new innovative approach to connecting and enriching data from many different content providers using the ‘Cloud’ which features: 1. Proven technology; 2. Aggregation and decentralised knowledge organisation; 3. Seamless integration of data into Europeana using the Europeana Gateway Node (EGN); 4. Clustering and ranking services; 5. Storytelling as scholarly integration feature; 6. Employ widely used common metadata formats; 7. Decentralised co-reference services for scalable, precise semantic indexing.
- Improve the Europeana system: 1. The EGN will help Europeana to scale the numbers of content providers and therefore setup easy-to-deploy aggregators; 2. Story objects, clustering and ranking services, both available in the Cloud and the Europeana infrastructure, will allow for more intuitive browsing and navigation of cultural heritage objects. The clustering service will guide with meaningful groupings of the result set to the result.
- Contribute to Europe’s role as a technology leader in cultural heritage by: 1. Integrating scholarly work with DLs; 2. Using innovative solutions for conceptual modelling (CIDOC CRM); 3. Creating an effective knowledge organisation – a cloud-based aggregation and dissemination of information objects; 4. Providing a scalable and extensible system which harnesses the power of the semantic web.
We have partners from: Austria, Finland, Germany, Greece, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Collections Trust’s role man role is to be the project co-ordinator. We are also contributing our expertise of standards (SPECTRUM) and IPR.
The bid has to be in by the 2nd of June and we should get a ‘yea or nay’. If ArcticCloud is accepted we then have to go into a period of contract negotiation and we hope to start the project at the beginning of next 2010. It is a privilege to be part of such a innovative project!
(PS it was orginally going to be called AC-DC, but this was modified for obvious reasons.)
