#Europeana advertises Thomas Lawrence

On #Facebook Europeana mentions that Thomas Lawrence died on this day in 1830. Europeana brings you a really nice presentation of his work.

Multiple people are known to Wikidata with the name of "Thomas Lawrence", and to know the difference between these men, it helps when there is sufficient information for the process of automated disambiguation.

I added a statement for Mr Lawrence and made him a "painter". At this moment there are 3852 painters known to Wikidata. When a label for painter is added for a language, the disambiguation for all of these people will improve.

Obviously there have been more than 3852 painters. As more painters become known and as more languages have their label for "painter", Wikidata gains value.
Thanks,
    GerardM

More heady stuff about #Wikidata and ontologies

When I asked Emw many questions, I received only three answers. Having an opinion on Wikidata and expressing it is hard. It feels very much like exploring new frontiers. The questions did not go away so I asked them again and, I am mighty pleased that Antoine Isaac was willing to provide me with some answers. Antoine does not do Wikidata, he is a/the scientific coordinator at Europeana.eu. He wrote an email to the Wikidata mailing list that got me interested in asking him my questions. I hope we will collaborate for our GLAM data well with Antoine and Europeana.

I exchanged several emails with Antoine but the answers do stand on their own. I will react in a follow up blog post. I hope you appreciate what Antoine has to say as much as I do.

Thanks,

     GerardM

The Wikipedia article calls upper level ontologies "political" why should Wikidata be interested in any of that?

I wouldn't call them 'political', that's a bit far-stretched. Indeed ULOs embody some abstract considerations on how to represent the world. And as said before, this can backfire as soon as you consider an open web of data, where different representations may well co-exist. Considering a single upper-level ontology as the guiding principle for everything is dangerous. But it is true that they provide valuable bodies of knowledge to re-use, and it may make sense to re-use them for specific domains (e.g. biology, geography) that could be compatible as a whole with the approach of one ULO.

Does it not make sense to group statements together as qualifiers as part of a statement (like it is done for office held [1]) ?

I like qualifiers and dislike them at the same time!On the one end, it's good to have some meta-metadata about the provenance of a statement (who made/endorsed it), or its scope (e.g. the time it applies). In your example, this is the "start date" and "end date". This practices actually fits what is happening in the RDF / Semantic Web area, where a lot of work is being done about Provenance, and many people use quad stores with 'named graphs' instead of just triple stores. 

On the other end, I am anxious about qualifiers being used with other semantics that "here's some info about a statement". In your example, "preceded by" and "succeeded by" are more difficult to interpret in this sense:  (compare with property P580 that mentions explicitly "statement"). I mean, it is possible to interpret your qualifiers as data on statement. But I really feel that people (and you?) will understand it as, say "Te Rata is the predecessor of Korokī Mahuta" and not "The statement 'Te Rata held the office of Maori Monarch' is the predecessor of the statement 'Korokī Mahuta held the office of Maori Monarch'". Which should be the right thing to do (I mean, the one compatible with the "start date" semantics).  

Note that what you told in the other email is the kind of use of qualifiers that would worry me: it is the person who has a birth/death date or a sex, not the statement 'is a person'.Of course one could see the birth and death date to influence of the 'date of validity of the statement "is a person"'. But still we'd be talking about two different things, from a knowledge representation perspective. 

Note also (just for the fun of refering to upper-level ontologies and their dangers) that for some ULOs 'is a person' doesn't have a begin and end date. Being a person is 'rigid' i.e. it must stick to the subject forever. You can't have been a person once and then cease to be a person. Even if you die you're still a person...And don't tell me that rigidity foresees the some ontologies may have Person an an anti-rigid property. This may probably not be the choice made in your favourite ULO. Unless it's one that addresses both reality and beliefs as two possible sides of a same property. But then, good luck re-using it!!!

DBpedia does not have qualifiers, will this impact their ability to use data from Wikidata?

I can't really speak for DBpedia. But I'd say that if qualifiers are used in a way that is both consistent and compatible with the understanding of 'named graphs' in RDF, then they might be interested.

As we map Wikidata items to the content in other repositories, what do we need to compare the data from these repositories

Which repositories are you talking about? Which content? Are 'repositories' knowledge bases, like OCLC or Europeana in the book/artwork domain? Is 'content' 'data'? If yes, then what is required to establish correspondences is hard work looking at the fields and seeing how they correspond. This may be of course alleviated if all (wikidata included) look at what's already happening and try to minimize the risk of coming with data models that are too indiosyncratic. (this is why something like RDF is quite useful!)

When differences in content between repositories are found is there a standard method to harmonise the content

Again assuming a reading of 'repositories' and 'content' as above. I don't think there is a standard method. What you can prey for (and of course as designers of data repositories, we are somehow in the position of making it happen!) is that all repositories keep track of as many unambiguous identifiers they can keep track of (e.g. ISBNs for books) which would help automatic reconciliation. Otherwise make sure the data on the content (where 'content'='the object in the real world') is as complete as possible. For works of art that would mean that comparisons can be made on titles, creators, dates and place of creation, etc.

Give #Europeana more of a global appeal

The Europeana blog enthuses about "Europioneers" and asks if you know anyone who you would like to nominate someone as one of "Europe’s finest technology entrepreneurs."

Europeana is a great initiative. It brings European culture to the Internet and it is becoming increasingly relevant and useful. Culture is an export product and at one time everything was ready to make the Europeana software available in Chinese and other languages that are not official languages of the EU.

This is still a great idea and the software had been localised in many languages. Several languages were fully localised and then, then it was decided by someone "higher up" that it was not such a good idea after all.

Pioneering is about breaking ground and, translatewiki.net did this for the world, Europe and Europeana. Given that Europe's finest technology entrepreneurs can be nominated, I nominate Siebrand Mazeland not only for his unrecognised work for Europeana but also for the important work he and his team do for the internationalisation and localisation of software and for the platform where people actually can do this work.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Use Europeana's TimeMash for #WikiLovesMonuments

#Europeana has a rich repository of images of many, many monuments. They show what monuments looked like once upon a time.

Wiki loves monuments is a photo competition where people are take pictures of monuments what they look like at this day and age.

The TimeMash application adds a dimension to the pictures that can be taken; it helps photographers make pictures from the same angle. The combination is powerful; pictures taken in this way are more interesting.

It is possible to have both images on Commons and even used in the projects. The challenge is to register and link such pictures and to have a tool to switch between such images.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#GLAM - About recognition

 Left Hand Bear, Oglala chief

This years #Commons picture of the year contest was different from last years. The many old images that were so lovingly restored and featured the Commons main page were not there any more.

A thread on the mailing list reminded me about all the hard work that gives images of the past a new lease of life. The image of Left Hand Bear, the Oglala chief is used a lot. As you can see below it is even used to make ties, mugs and buttons.

The image of Left Hand Bear has been lovingly restored by Adam Cuerden. The original of this image is at the Library of Congress and I owe a debt of gratitude to both Adam and the LoC.

Adam restored an image preserved at the Library of Congress. Knowing this, I am sure that this is indeed an image of Left Hand Bear. The image is obviously in the public domain and as such I am not required to acknowledge either the LoC or Adam. I may put the image on mugs, ties and buttons and sell them.

For both Commons and Wikipedia, acknowledging the LoC and Adam bring important benefits. Acknowledging the LoC provides provenance of the image, this is the equivalent of providing a source to a fact. Acknowledging Adam links the much improved image to the original. It recognises Adam for his work.

Acknowledging the LoC and Adam IS a best practice. It is a best practice promoted by organisations like Europeana. It is a best practice that is not a requirement, it is however something that we should aspire to.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#ImpactOCR - Citing a #newspaper

#Wikipedia has this rule: "Citation needed". Much of the news is first published in newspapers. When a citation is needed about something that happened, it is in the newspaper where you will find it mentioned and there may be many chronological entries on the same subject describing how something evolves.

A lot of research and development has gone in the optical character reading of newspaper of the Impact project. As this project has ended and has evolved into a competence centre, its last conference was very much a presentation of what the project achieved.

From my perspective, it produced a lot of software much of it open sourced and all of it is implemented and embedded in the library, archive and research world. It is a world that finds its public for the work done in the Impact project very much in the research world. The general public can benefit as much, what has to be clear is how it could benefit.

Though Europeana newspapers some 10 million newspaper pages will be made accessible. These pages are scanned and to make them really useful they undergo optical character recognition. This is exactly where the Impact project has its impact; as the OCR technology improves, more words are correctly recognised and consequently more content of the newspapers can be discovered.

The results can be improved even further when the public helps train the OCR software recognise characters for specific documents. As citing sources for Wikipedia is an obvious use case for historic newspapers, there are many people who are willing to teach OCR engines to do a better job. For those articles that are found to be particularly useful, proofreading can improve the results even further.

With a public that is involved in improving the digitised and OCR-ed texts everybody will be a winner including the scientific research on these texts.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Wiki loves Art Nouveau

#Wikipedia documents in many languages the buildings that are of such a significance that they are officially recognised as "monuments". All these articles need illustrations and Wiki loves Monuments is the photo competition that rallied people from all over Europe to take pictures of the buildings and its details.

Once all this pictures were in, Europeana selected some to create its first user generated exhibition online called: Wiki loves Art Nouveau. The exhibitions shows of European Art Nouveau in four themes: exteriors, interiors, details and author's pick.

If you do not know Europeana yet, visit their website. They are the portal that brings more and more of the European cultural to the Internet. They are also instrumental in gently pushing European GLAM towards using free licenses.
Thanks,
      GerardM

We love libraries and #Europeana and, they love us

European librarians have decided that the meta data on all books published in Europe will be made available under a CC-0 license through Europeana. The details can be found in this PDF.

Reading the text, makes it quite plain why Europe can be so wonderful. This is not only the librarians making a statement, it is the European commissioner Mrs Neelie Kroes who backs this up politcally.

As practically all books are published in Europe and as the Google book scanning project operates in Europe as well, it is not only English books that will find their meta data on Europeana.

My favourite quote from the PDF:

It will mean that Wikipedia can use the metadata, linking it to all sorts of articles....

Yes, we love Europeana, we would be thrilled to help the world find the way to the culture it promotes, our culture it promotes.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Europeana calculating for public domain

It is often pertinent to know if something is in the public domain or not. Europeana brings us a calculator that helps you decide for 13 European countries at this time. Calculators for more legislatures will follow.

While it is fun to play with such functionality, it would be nice if the calculator would not only work for a country but would also be available in the language of that country. At translatewiki.net we are ready to localise this as well as other Europeana functionality.
Thanks,
       GerardM

My #Europeana

 

When you promote a service and the application it runs on, it makes sense to use it as well. The procedure to create my own "my Europeana" profile is easy. At the moment I am interested in everything Batak and Europeana does not disappoint. There is music, scripts, film, photos... all from different European GLAM's and all pointing back to these GLAM's where rich annotations are available.

When you search a subject like "Batak" on Google, you will find literally everything that can be found on the Internet. With Europeana there is no duplication, you find all relevant material that is digitised and available from European GLAM's.

What does disappoint is that many of the texts in Europeana are not translated. It makes for instance sense to promote Waisda in Dutch as it is a Dutch language project only. In a way it makes sense, you have to have a platform and a community that allows for crowd sourced translations and as the number of languages in Europeana is high, it must be hard to maintain a semblance of classic quality assurance.
Thanks,
       GerardM

The new Renaissance is digital

#Europe's cultures have had a worldwide influence. An influence that can be observed worldwide in modern cultural expressions. European merchants brought curios from all over the world and consequently museums and archives have become a rich resource of mementos of all the worldwide cultures.

Jean Monet once said: "If Europe were to be reconstructed, I would begin with culture rather than the
economy". A renaissance is a rebirth and, the European Union recognises the fact that the Internet is where many of the new cultural manifestations take place. The classic cultures had their renaissance after hundreds of years after their demise. A report commissioned by the European Commission called "The New Renaissance" discusses how our cultural heritage can be given a new lease of life, how it can become part of a worldwide renaissance of Culture.

The original renaissance happened after many of the classical artefacts were damaged or destroyed. This European report recognises that something similar may happen. It may happen when our archives, our museum collections are not digitised but also when copyright orphans are excluded because of the FUD that surrounds them.

Europeana plays an important role in the European strategy. It is therefore stellar to read that the European cultural heritage is to be accessible to the greatest number of people without distinction or barrier. Language is such a barrier and it is therefore really relevant that the initial localisation of Europeana at translatewiki.net now includes simplified Chinese. You will also find European languages like Macedonian, Serbian, Breton and Luxembourgian that will be new to Europeana.

When you are interested in the European vision on the riches its museums and archives contain, you will find this document a "must read".
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Hackaton update

With a room full of hackers, #GLAM, #Wikipedia and #MediaWiki hackers a lot gets done. The best bit is probably the interaction, the demonstrations, the explanations of techniques. It is best because this enables people to do better.

• Robert finished enabling Europeana in translatewiki.net
• today the Serbian localisation has been done completely !!
• Robert has started work to get pywikipedia enabled in translatewiki
• the statistics for our GLAM partners is being looked at
• a prototype was build for importing images out of a CMS of a GLAM
• a sentence level editor was demonstrated; the best bit is that usability studies determine its functionality
• I got one new t-shirt and Siebrand got three
• a first upload button from Open Images to MediaWiki was hacked together
• the temperature of the pizza kept the presentations brief - they were good

Thanks,
      GerardM

#Hackaton for ten years of #GLAM and #Wikipedia cooperation

On the eve of celebrating 10 years of Wikipedia, we prepare for the next decenium hacking on the technology that will make the cooperation with GLAMs that much easier and sophisticated.

The group of people we have brought together consists of some of the MediaWiki greats but there are also people from cultural heritage organisations. Face time is gold.

We flew RobertHL in from Great Britain to work on one project; enabling support for Europeana. Europeana is the European portal to what is already digitally available of what European museums, archives and libraries. What is truly awesome is that by translating at translatewiki.net you enable other parts of the world to access what is a world class project.

This is only one of the things that are going on..
Thanks,
     GerardM

A plan for a subsequent photo competition

The Dutch #Wikipedia photo competition Wiki Loves Monuments has been a resounding success and, a text is circulating to do it on an even bigger scale next year. I am happy to use it on my blog as a great example that there are many ways to have photo competitions.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Summary of this email 

Sorry for a long text...  We did "Wiki Loves Monuments" in the Netherlands and we would like to do Wiki Loves Monuments again in 2011, but now in Europe. This is possible when many chapters participate. To be clear: this event will only happen on a European level if there is sufficient chapter and community participation to combine efforts. Please feel free to forward this to whomever you find appropriate.

You might have heard before about Wiki Loves Monuments 2010 in the Netherlands. It was a highly successful photo scavenger hunt with 12.500 submissions and over 250 participants. We recently completed a post mortem of this project with a full description and an analysis. There are still many more monuments in the Netherlands which can be photographed and we are considering another run for next year and, we want to give it an European context. Below we will explain how we got where we are, what we have in mind, and what you can become a part of it. 

It all started on the Dutch language Wikipedia with the windmill project. One of its main goals was to have an article with an image for every windmill in the Netherlands. Lists were created of windmills per province and statistics were regularly updated to track progress. This approach worked really well and now all the windmills have an article.

Volunteers together with the Dutch chapter, managed to get a dataset of all 60.000 "Rijksmonumenten" ie buildings/objects with some historical or cultural relevance from the "Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed". This marked the birth of the "Rijksmonumenten" project. The project uses the lessons learned in the windmill project. The data from the RCE was converted into lists by location and put on the Dutch Wikipedia. The community started improving the lists by adding missing information and by adding photo's.

In June 2009 Wikimedia Nederland ran Wiki Loves Art /NL This was a  photo scavenger hunt in more than 40 museums. It was quite successful, 5.400 photos, but it was much more laborious because we needed to keep contacts with all the participating museums and the nearest museum was usually further away from people's homes than the nearest monument. 

For 2010 we were looking for a nice topic for a photo competition. The "Rijksmonumenten" project was running very well so we decided to organize Wiki Loves Monuments to give this project a boost.

So, what could a European WLM look like? Obviously it is very much open for debate but we are trying to incorporate the lessons learned in the Netherlands into a European model. We think it will work best with national Wiki Loves Monuments projects and international cooperation, shared resources and international prizes. The national contests do not have to be identical, but similarity will prove to be practical. We are not sure yet what countries would be most successful, but initially we are considering the EU chapter countries and Switzerland ...

Wiki Loves Monuments would run in the month of September 2011, and participants will submit photos of monuments which are part of a list of monuments. This list includes the addresses and maybe the geo-coordinates of all the identified monuments. In each participating country there will be some prizes available, to be awarded by a jury for that country and the best will be competing for prizes in an European final. 

Most of the local work will be to get a database with the objects and create object lists from that. Dutch volunteers can support you as they have the experience. You will need to communicate to get the community and the public informed. You will need to find a jury and prizes for them to award. We can help with example press releases, best practices, templates and list examples and community motivation. 

So, what to do when you like the idea? First of all check with your collegues (at the board, other members, community) what they think of it. You will need several people to run such a project. The next step is to analyse your local situation: who would be good partners (who keeps the lists of monuments?) for you, how many monuments are there in your country, are they well spread? Roughly how much information/photos is already available and are there community members already active in this field?

We already registered www.wikilovesmonuments.eu and are in touch with CARARE and Europeana who may help us by laying contacts with European Union cultural heritage organizations. This will stress the European context and the impact this may have. The most important partner in each country will be the one that maintains a database with bational monuments, and may release this to you. Such a database/list is crucial for the success of such an event. 

Please inform us when you are interested in joining in such European event. When there is enough enthusiasm, we will create a special (easy to join) mailing list to coordinate efforts and to allow the volunteers to join in the discussions. We  took the liberty of discussing this with some chapters, and are hopeful that it will actually become the first grand chapter cooperation program. You can already join #wikilovesmonuments on freenode irc when you are interested. 

With kind regards,

Maarten Dammers
Lodewijk Gelauf

Implementing the #CC-PD-mark at #glamwiki

In Paris Multichil added the CC-PD-mark to #Commons. He identified over 1 million files as public domain and, he added system messages that enable the localisers at translatewiki.net to work their magic.

One of the things achieved by the CC-PD-mark is that the GLAM that has the original of a public domain work is identified. This has the same relevance as associating a source with a fact.

While the CC-PD-mark is based on good-will it does add value as it provides both provenance and good relations with the GLAM world it is the kind of good-will that provides us with a win-win strategy.

Our adoption of the CC-PD-mark is of immense interest to Europeana. With 1,069,565 files labelled in this our is probably the largest collection identified in this way. There will be a substantial overlap with the collections that Europeana represents and this makes Europeana an obvious partner for collaborating on meta data.

Pictures of Calcutta on Europeana

As Europeana is to represent the cultural heritage that can be found in European GLAMs, it is an extremely relevant resource for a world wide public. To make it more accessible, we have offered to localise the Europeana website at translatewiki.net. As the software is freely licensed, Siebrand and Mulichil did already have a peek at the code ....
Thanks,
       GerardM

The secret of our success

Sue Gardner analysed factors of our success. The arguments are quite solid and Sue is asking for observations. Observations are about focus and points of view and mine are different. 

This virtuous circle is what is considered how growth happens in our projects. To define what this means: reach is the people using our projects, participation is the people working on our projects and quality is the result of a community working together.

While the arguments are quite solid, the focus of the examples is her own. As its director, Sue is at the centre of the Wikimedia Foundation and her objective of her blogpost is to "document some good patterns of leadership and change-making". All the case studies she picked were centrally organised and she had a hand in all of them.

Each of our projects has its own community and in addition to this, the chapter structure represents yet another set of closely related communities. If you want to look for "leadership and change making" the best practices in the communities and chapters will prove the most strategic for realising our aims. The role of the Wikimedia Foundation should consequently be one of facilitator.

The 2010 activities in India have been game changing. A visit by Jimmy Wales attracts 600 Wikimedians. Series of workshops, academies are held and planned... the list of activities goes on. The activities in the south are the envy of those in the north but, understanding and nurturing the processes and its interactions will be essential when we want to maximise our growth not only in India.

Great developments have happened in 2010 in our relations with GLAM. After his stint as a "Wikipedian in residence" at the British Museum Liam Wyatt is now travelling all over the world bringing our message to the GLAM world and as importantly bringing the GLAM message to our world. This is technically supported by people like Multichill and Magnus Manske. The Wikimedia GLAM projects have the potential of building the home for the cultural heritage of the world.

The 2010 competition of Jakarta universities showed the best practice in engaging both students and their teachers. The set-up included many novelties and its success has the potential to be the template for a competition of Indonesian universities and the best practice for university projects elsewhere.

Translatewiki.net proved its worth when it became apparent how little was needed to improve mobile support for Wikipedia. In a very short time the twn community realised the localisation for many languages and a mobile main page for many Wikipedias were created. This resulted in a short lived exponential growth. This fizzled because of a stagnation in mobile development.

The development of MediaWiki is centrally planned and managed. The focus has been exclusively on WMF office projects. This resulted in extremely ambitious and rigidly managed projects that excluded what was not immediately seen to fit. MediaWiki is relevant here because it represents the platform in the virtuous circle.

Things are opening up. It shows in the recent Hack-A-Ton, the search for the desperately needed bugmeister, the announced hire of a developer who is to integrate mobile support in MediaWiki and the integration of mobile traffic statistics. There is still so much that is waiting to happen because of a lack of resources and assigned priorities.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Europeana keeping its promises? duh!

Its presentations are now available online. Eh, I think more needs to be done in expectation management.

Some people used powerpoint and some used prezi. What I was expecting was the videos of the presentations. These videos were made and they are not online. So I wonder what the we were waiting for.. and if waiting some more makes a difference.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Update: I learned that the videos of the keynote speakers will come online as well.

Conferences come and go ..

Conferences come and go and when it is held in an "exotic" location like Kosovo it is more likely that the audience do not find it exotic. The conference in Kosovo was part of a series of events that started with a conference in Vlora, Albania and culminated in a big conference in Kosovo.

The Kosovo conference was video taped.. The result is that presentations by people like Rob Savoye, Leon Shiman and Peter Salus are available to you on archive.org. Kim Bruning presented about Wikipedia ..

Another recent conference was Europeana in Amsterdam. Its presentations were video taped as well. Several of the presentations can be found on things like slideshare. The presentations will be coming soon as well it is advertised.

Wikimania in Gdansk had its presentations taped but I wonder if and when they become available. It is really sad that these videos are not on line as many people were networking in stead of presentation hopping in the understanding that it would be possible to see them later.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Europeana and #swag

At the Europeana 2010 conference, participants were given a bag with goodies. A booklet about Amsterdam, a pen, a notepad ..

The many variations on the Europeana logo are really nice; they look good and at the conference most people have a laptop. Geeks like me often have an array of stickers on the back of their computer. Stickers were used to indicate directions so it was just a matter of asking if one was available.

I cut the figure out of the white space and now I proudly advertise that I have attended a great conference.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Why #Google Books is a breath of fresh air

At #Europeana, there was a track on the first day about the risks and rewards. This turned out in a big FUD fest about copyrights. This negative stance was later explained as "bringing a sense of reality to the party". The problem is the current acceptance of copyright practices. Copyright holders claim rights to exploitation and are wilfully blind to any responsibilities.

The Google books project very much fulfils the responsibilities of copyright holders. As it scans the books that are contained in libraries, it ensures that these books are preserved in a digital format.

It makes these books available on the Internet. This is great news for books that are already in the public domain. The best news is that books that are considered "orphans" and books that are still in print are also scanned. Google seeks active cooperation for books in this category, it provides methods for people to buy such books either as a "dead wood" or as a digitital copy.

In the United States there is agreement on a method that allows Google to sell orphan works where the copyright holder is missing. As there is no such provision for Europe, Europeans will have less access to their cultural heritage.

The FUD around copyright damages the availability of knowledge, it does not help with the exploitation of books. Optimisation of access to our cultural heritage trumps the opinion of copyright holders where they do not take responsibility and provide an adequate service.
Thanks,
       GerardM