Transcript Dia 1

Antoine Isaac
Europeana – VU University Amsterdam
Dagstuhl Multilingual Semantic Web seminar
Europeana
“A digital library that is a single, direct and multilingual
access point to the European cultural heritage.”
European Parliament
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24 M objects (images, text, sound and video)
From over 2.200 libraries, museums, archives
From 33 countries
For everyone
Multilingual Access in Europeana
Dimensions of multilingual access
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Interface
Search (query translation or document translation)
Result presentation
Browsing
Europeana's efforts
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Interface translated into 26 languages
Query translation: only prototype
Query result filtering by country/language
Document translation (user enabled)
Semantic contextualization of objects
• Multilingual enrichment/annotation of metadata
Making metadata work for
multilingual access
Current metadata in Europeana
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Simple object records
Flat (text values)
Without language tags!
Only language-related info on metadata is at collection level
• Can be "mul"
Need to change!
 a new Europeana Data Model (EDM)
"Semantic layer" of contextual resources
(concepts, persons, places, events...)
Cultural artefact
Buildling
Sculpture
Painting
Networked objects
Exploiting semantic relations
e.g. “broader concept”, “place of birth”, “involved person”…
Multilingual metadata
Fetching already available linked data
E.g., from libraries
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/XGR-lld-vocabdataset/
Interoperability
 Encouraging the use of RDF + common and simple elements
Interoperability
 Encouraging the use of common and simple data elements
<skos:Concept rdf:about="http://www.mimo-db.eu/InstrumentsKeywords/2308">
<skos:prefLabel xml:lang="fr">Piano carré</skos:prefLabel>
<skos:prefLabel xml:lang="it">Pianoforte a tavolino</skos:prefLabel>
<skos:prefLabel xml:lang="en">Square pianoforte</skos:prefLabel>
<skos:prefLabel xml:lang="de">Tafelklavier</skos:prefLabel>
<skos:prefLabel xml:lang="nl">Tafelpiano</skos:prefLabel>
<skos:prefLabel xml:lang="sv">Taffel</skos:prefLabel>
<skos:broader>
<skos:Concept rdf:about="http://www.mimo-db.eu/InstrumentsKeywords/2273">
<skos:prefLabel xml:lang="en">Pianofortes</skos:prefLabel>
</skos:Concept>
</skos:broader>
</skos:Concept>
Interoperability
 mixed nature of eligible contextual resources:
dictionaries, synonym/translation lists, thesauri,
authority lists, gazetteers…
 interplay: “semantic” data next to multilingual data
Simultaneous approaches
 Getting richer semantic/multilingual metadata from providers
 Fetching third-party contextual data and linking it to “uncontextualized” objects
 Linking contextual data from an institution to another more
general / more commonly used contextual dataset
• Dbpedia.org, VIAF.org…
Status and challenges
Current status
 All this is work in progress and will take time
R&D prototypes (EuropeanaConnect) showing the challenges of
gathering appropriate multilingual tools and data
 First tests of simple techniques in production portal:
GeoNames (places) and GEMET (concepts)
Encouraging, but illustrate issues with too naïve approaches (no
NLP) and incomplete data
• Cheval
• Poison
http://www.europeana.eu
Problems & requirements
For providers & Europeana
 Continue work on metadata
 Benchmarking (cf. CHiC lab @ CLEF)
 Positioning as consumers and contributors of data (cf Asun’s slides)
data.europeana.eu
For language-intensive tools and resources
 Availability: open resources
 Interoperability
 Simplicity
• But not always! E.g., not only “first hit” translations
 Scale: scalability of tools, number and scope of datasets
 Many languages, some lesser-resourced (wrt. English)
Another illustration: VOICES project
Voice-based community-centric mobile services for social development
 Easing communication on agricultural trade
 Listing of products/prices via phone/radio
 Pilot in Mali
Challenges
 Data-centric project, but language technology plays a crucial role
 Objects should be provided with textual and audio labels (text-tospeech system) in different languages
 Local languages: e.g., Bambara
 Lack of resource: need low-cost, easy-to-adapt solutions
Victor de Boer, VU Amsterdam ([email protected])
Thank you
[email protected]
http://www.few.vu.nl/~aisaac/
Some slides based on Marlies Olensky and Juliane Stiller Multilingual Web Workshop, June 11, 2012, Dublin