Gregory Markus
EuropeanaTech Community Manager , Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision
Clemens Neudecker
Project Coordinator , Berlin State Library
The EuropeanaTech Community is one of the Europeana Network Association's six specialist communities. Explore their work plan for 2021.
In 2021, EuropeanaTech, the R&D community within the Europeana Network Association, will bolster its role as an intermediary knowledge sharing body of digital cultural heritage experts with considerable focus on growing innovative technologies related to AI and 3D presentation of digital cultural heritage. Additionally, EuropeanaTech will continue growing its relationships with other cultural heritage communities like IIIF and provide more opportunities for community members to share their work around the world through our publication, EuropeanaTech Insight.
Read and download the full EuropeanaTech Community work plan below. You can also join the EuropeanaTech Community.
EuropeanaTech Steering Group Chair:
Co-Chairs:
Managers:
Steering Group Members:
Grow EuropeanaTech’s role as a facilitator of knowledge exchange within the Europeana Network Association
Support and accelerate the identification and adoption of new and innovative technologies for the cultural heritage sector
Our priority areas of focus directly align with the Europeana 2021-2025 strategy:
“Tech is changing all the time. Reflecting its public service role, Europeana will develop and use cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, e-translation and machine learning in line with the European Commission’s Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI”
AI in relation to Cultural Heritage
We will continue our AI related efforts following the conclusion of the AI in Relation to GLAMs task force. These will include:
Formation of a EuropeanaTech AI working group. This working group will provide a space for discussion and expertise to continue the focused growth of AI within digital cultural heritage.
We will coordinate and share knowledge from other AI related groups for instance, AI4Media, AI4LAMs, AI+Museums Network.
Start inventory on national AI investments across EU27 and see how much investments are made in the Cultural and Creative Industries to highlight its significance.
Multilingual discovery and access
The steering group will investigate possible actions to enhance the multilingual coverage of vocabularies and cross-vocabulary alignment. Furthering Europeana’s work with relation to full-text, collaborating with and sharing knowledge with the EuropeanaTech community and related centres of competence such as e.g. Impact.
3D Content
Follow up the efforts from the 3D task force in relation to 3D standards, accessibility and interoperability of digital representations:
Dialogue with IIIF 3D community, identify use cases
4CH - centre of competence on 3D in cultural heritage
EuropeanaTech will hold another open call for task forces from the EuropeanaTech community. However, due to travel uncertainties and to discourage superfluous travel we will require all task forces to coordinate digitally.
The AV task force which was tabled for 2020 will resume activities in 2021.
The AI in Relation to GLAMs task force will wrap up its activities in early 2021. This will include:
The finalisation of the open call for AI datasets that was postponed to 2021
Delivery of final report
Establishing a formal AI in Cultural Heritage working group
The Citations and Annotations TFs are still on “pause”. Motivations to develop them in 2021 will be encouraged but the EuropeanaTech SG are not listing this as a priority.
The EuropeanaTech x IIIF Working Group will reevaluate its approach in order to reinvigorate the Europeana Network Associations’ uptake of IIIF.
EuropeanaTech will continue contributing blogs to Europeana Pro.
More issues of EuropeanaTech Insight will be published in 2021.
EuropeanaTech will further pursue the task of coordinating Twitter Takeovers to grow engagement on the @EuropeanaTech Twitter account
We will investigate a series of small webinars in replacement of EuropeanaTech main event/conference and will actively contribute to the development of the Europeana Capacity Building Framework
Doing a webinar on “Saint George on a Bike” (and maybe other projects) work on computer vision and AI.
Collaborate on updating the Europeana Research and Innovation agenda (first published in 2018) with the network in such a way that it could inform the funding calls within Horizon Europe.
Run an open challenge at the beginning of the year inviting proposals for the assembly of suitable AI/ML datasets, drawing from the extensive Europeana Collections. We are aiming for the creation of large, well-documented datasets that are shaped for direct takeup for AI/ML purposes (e.g. training a model) and that can be made publicly available on the relevant online platforms under open licenses
Including reserve list of activities in case there is extra budget by July 2021.
Activity: AI open call/ challenge
Spending quarter: Q1
Amount: 5.000EUR (2020 carry over)
Activity: AV Task Force
Spending quarter: Q3
Amount: 2.500EUR
Activity: New open call/ challenge
Spending quarter: Q4
Amount: 2.500 EUR
