Tourism & Social Networks Challenges are now open for Applications
If you missed the opportunity to participate in our first round of challenges then don’t worry, we’re pleased to announce that Europeana Creative is once again looking for creative developers, designers, start-ups and other entrepreneurs to re-use Europe’s digitised cultural heritage from Europeana in innovative and creative ways! Our second Challenge is to create applications that reuse Europeana content in the themes of Tourism or Social Networks.
The best ideas in the themes of Tourism and Social Networks will receive a tailor made Incubation Support Package as a prize, helping to bring your product idea successfully to the market! The prize consists of specialist support measures delivered by a team of experts providing business mentoring, technical support, assistance with identifying and accessing finance, facilitation of business partnerships, access to specialised testing environments, marketing and promotion support. Read more about the Incubation Support Package here.
In order to help inspire you with the new round of challenges Europeana Creative has developed some innovative Pilot Applications to demonstrate the things you can do with Europeana content and a little bit of imagination.
The Tourism Pilot Application is called, VanGoYourself and is the brainchild of Culture24 in the UK and Plurio.net in Luxembourg. Our Tourism Pilot is a genuinely different and surprisingly deep way for visitors to engage with heritage, based on emotion, playfulness and curiosity.
Have you ever wanted to recreate a version of Vermeer’s Milkmaid in your own kitchen or get together with your friends on a Saturday night out and recreate the scene in Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper? VanGoYourself wants to get people to rediscover and engage with classic paintings from around the world in a new and exciting way.
The birth of VanGoYourself! The Europeana Creative team having supper in Mons. License of this image- CC-BY-SA License of original image- Fondazione Federico Zeri - Universita? di Bologna - Public Domain
VanGoYourself encourages you to recreate classic scenes from some of world’s most famous paintings in a contemporary setting, which you can then share with your friends on social media. The site features works from Masters such as Van Gogh and Rembrandt - with over fifty paintings from more than ten collections in seven European countries all just waiting to be recreated!
Screenshot of the VanGoYourself website, with some of the VanGo'd images so far
The service will be used by tourist offices, museums, cities, tour guides and others to promote specific destinations, sites and events. Why? Because above all, the tourism sector seeks to provide visitors with a great experience of a place in order to get them to return to a destination or to tell friends and family about it in a positive way. The Tourism Pilot could help to provide that experience. It can easily be integrated in existing marketing schemes and is very "light-weight" in terms of costs and management. This is something visitors and tourists can do together, as friends or as a family, and can then share with more people online. It's inherently sociable and playful – and everyone loves an interesting or amusing photo!
The Social Networks Pilot Application, Sound Connections, is currently in beta so watch this space for more inspiration. The objective of the Social Networks Pilot, developed by We Are What We Do, is to attract suppliers of websites with social elements to embed Europeana content in their services. This Pilot has harnessed the Europeana API to integrate sounds from the British Library and Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision, via SoundCloud and AudioBoo, onto Historypin.com, a map based collaborative history platform. Ontotext has supported this integration with services for geo-referencing of data based on entity extraction.
The pilot will focus on bird and airplane field recordings, as well as city sounds from Amsterdam and London. The user interface for the pilot will allow users to explore, listen to and enrich these sounds. Communities of interest and their social networks, such as bird watchers and plane spotters, will be invited to interact with the audio content. They will be able to link to content from sources such as Europeana, Wikipedia, Flickr and even upload material from their own personal collections.
We hope that you are now sufficiently inspired and understand the themes of our new challenges. Over the course of the next weeks we will also be publishing a series of blog posts sharing unused ideas that were generated during co-creation workshops for the Pilot Applications. These can act as further inspiration for you or maybe you’d like to take one of these ideas and develop it further into a finished application and submit it as your own entry.
If you have an idea but are a little overwhelmed by what Europeana content you could use, how to access it, or maybe the usage restrictions then take a look at our blog post on Europeana Labs. Europeana Labs is a novel Open Innovation platform that sets out to provide its community of users with everything needed to start using the Europeana APIs and develop apps that re-use digitised cultural heritage objects. Here you can learn about the data, see what others have created, and find out how to build simple but powerful queries to extract bespoke results from a dataset of over 30 million objects, which include books, photos of art and artefacts, audio clips and more. Don’t hesitate to contact us on api@europeana.eu if you have any questions or need additional support to access the data you need.
The deadline for applications is August 28th 2014 at 16h CET. The best applications will be invited to pitch their concept at our Open Innovation Challenges event in Barcelona on the 23rd of September 2014, hosted in collaboration with Apps&Culture, where the winners will be chosen.