ATHENA’s owl a ‘wow’ with the Commission
Just back from 3 days in a snowy Luxembourg where the first review of the ATHENA project took place at the European Commission offices.
As with all EC project reviews there was a set pattern to the proceedings. These start about a month before the review when the Commission choose two independent reviewers and send them the deliverables (the project results) for them to read.
In the case of ATHENA not all deliverables were reports. A large section of our work is an ingestion and data mapping tool which allows partners to upload their metadata and map it to the new metadata harvesting schema LIDO. The data is also converted to the current Europeana data model ESE (Europeana Semantic Elements - Dublin Core based). Therefore the reviewers were given access to the online tool.
The day before the review workpackage leaders met to have a dry run of the presentations that they will be making. Timings are inportant as there is only a limited time allowed for the review process. The run through also gave the chance to ‘polish’ presentations.
On the big day:
- The project makes its presentations;
- The reviewers ask questions;
- They go away to make their deliberations;
- Come back to give the result of the and possibly make suggestions.
The whole process went very well with all the deliverables being praised for their high quality. Even the owl logo of the project was mentioned as a great piece of work! There were some helpful suggestions on how the project should proceed, but these were in the spirit of improving an already good body of work.
Needless to say the project was given the go ahead to continue into its second half.
The only problem with the whole process was the sudden snow storm that closed Luxembourg Airport for the night about half an hour before I was due to fly out!
