Newsletter March 2013

We are happy to announce the third Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana newsletter. In this, we will give an overview of all the events around the DM2E
project in the last three months. This newsletter is published on a quarterly base. If you have any questions or comments, please send them to [email protected].
Also, make sure to follow @DM2Europeana for the latest updates!

In this newsletter

* Launch of the Open Humanities Awards
* Wittgenstein Incubator has started
* Two new content providers
* DM2E meeting in Vienna
* Update on DM2E Data Model
* Ontotext associated partner of the project
* Pundit promotional video
* DM2E events calendar
* Open Knowledge Foundation at SXSW
* Europeana Cloud

Launch of the Open Humanities Awards

The first steps in the Wittgenstein pilot have been made. 5000 pages of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass have been made available in Pundit, the semantic annotation tool
that is being developed in the project, and a group of scholars is now doing humanities research with this tool.

This pilot will be a great way to collect feedback from a scholarly community and further develop Pundit to the needs of humanities researchers. The
scholars will use Pundit to collect and annotate the texts of particular relevance. Equally through software, they will be able to interact and comment
each other’s views and questions.

Before the launch, the University of Bergen, who has
digitised the work of Wittgenstein, has worked intensively together with the lead developers of Pundit, Net7.

Two

new

content

providers

We are happy to announce that new content providers will be adding additional data and content to Europeana via the Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana
project.

First there is the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) JDC is a humanitarian organization with a long history of
humanitarian relief in Europe and elsewhere. The JDC Archives are a member of the Judaica Europeana network of collection holders with European Jewish
content in archives, libraries and museums. It is through their involvement in Judaica Europeana that JDC will be providing their data to Europeana via
DM2E.

The other provider is the University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg in Frankfurt (UBFFM), which will provide a set of
medieval manuscripts and are currently mapping their metadata to the DM2E model.

Adding these collections to Europeana via the project will result in richer metadata that can greatly improve the possibilities for humanities scholars for
research.

Additionally, two new associated content providers, Brandeis University and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, signed Letters of Intent.

DM2E

meeting

in

Vienna

At the end of November, the biannual DM2E meeting was organised in Vienna. Representatives from all consortium partners presented the work they have been
doing in the first part of the project. For a full overview and all the slidedecks see the blog

Update

on

DM2E

Data

Model

The DM2E data model has been refined and will be released in its next version soon. The model is a specialization of the Europeana Data Model (EDM) and provides full compatibility for an easy ingestion of resource descriptions
from DM2E to Europeana. The data model also extends EDM and provides classes and properties to describe the data publishing using the VoID vocabulary. This
introduces a metalevel to EDM that will be used to track the provenance of all DM2E data in line with the Linked Data principles and best practices.

Since the meeting in Vienna, the development of the intermediate version of the DM2E infrastructure has been started. It is a new implementation that
builds on the experiences gained from the OmNom prototype presented in Vienna. It is yet too early to go into the details, but
the architecture will be based on simple RESTful web services and features transparent provenance tracking from the published DM2E data back to the
original files ingested by the providers. The intermediate version is due in September, so more details can be expected in our next newsletter.

Ontotext

new

associated

partner

During the DM2E meeting in Vienna, it was announced that Ontotext, a Bulgarian company that
develops core semantic technology, text mining and web mining solutions will become an associated partner of the project. It was agreed that Ontotext will
provide licenses to their OWLIM-SE triple store and will also provide technical assistance for
installation and configuration to set up OWLIM-SE as a backend repository for the tools being developed within the DM2E project.

OWLIM is a family of semantic repositories, RDF database management system, implemented in Java, delivering full performance through both Sesame and Jena,
robust support for the semantics of RDFS, OWL 2 RL and OWL 2 QL, best scalability, loading and query evaluation. More information about OWLIM is available
at http://www.ontotext.com/owlim.

Pundit

promotional

video

The team of Net7 has released a great video about the Pundit tool. It explains how Pundit can support researchers and in what ways. The video can be found here.

DM2E

events

calendar

All events that are being organised by members of the DM2E project, or events they are attending are being listed in a shared events calendar that can be found here.

Open

Knowledge

Foundation

at

SXSW

The Open Knowledge Foundation has been invited to join a panel during the annual South by Southwest conference. Sam Leon will join an international panel
with Antoine Isaac, Scientific Coordinator for Europeana, Emily Gore, Director of Content at the Digital Public Library of America and Rachel Frick, Program Director at the CLIR Digital Library Federation
about the state of openness in the cultural heritage domain and where we go to next in order to build a vibrant cultural commons free for everyone to
re-use and enjoy. More info can be found here and the slides of the talk here

Launch

of

Europeana

Cloud

In the first week of March, Europeana Cloud was kicked off in Den Hague. Europeana Cloud is a Best Practice Network, coordinated by the
Europeana Foundation, designed to establish a cloud-based system for Europeana and its aggregators. In this project, a research platform that uses
Europeana content for research in the humanities will be built. Also, the project aims to actively engage with digital humanities research groups. Several
members of the DM2E project, such as the Austrian National Library and the Open Knowledge Foundation are also partners in this project. During the kick-off
there was a lot of interest in the work that has been done in DM2E and we will aim for a close collaboration between the two projects.

Thanks again for your continuing interest in the project.