Annotations and EuropeanaProject Assembly 2014 - Tech

Workshops2014-09-25

David Haskiya

About this presentation

In this presentation I will summarise the business and user value of supporting user created annotations in Europeana. I will also describe different types of annotations and suggest a relative priority from a Europeana perspective.

This presentation is not a technical specification nor a product development plan.

Table of Contents

• Why annotations?• What are annotations?• What is needed to support annotations?• Risks!

Why annotations?

•Meaningful connections across institutional silos•Curated sets (galleries/collections) of objects•Increased amounts of geodata•Increased amounts of links to Things•Enriched metadata to funnel back to our data partners•Improved recall and precision in search •Improved SEO

By encouraging and making it easy for our users to annotate our content we will support a deeper and more meaningful user experience, but we can also expect a number of other positive outcomes:

What are annotations?

• Media annotations• Image annotations, but also text, audio and video annotations

• Geotags• Object tags (usually just referred to as tagging)• User created relations between objects• User created object sets or collections• Corrections

• Of original metadata• Of automatic enrichments

• Translations of metadata• Liking, and rating of objects• Transcription of texts from images could be considered

as a form of annotation

Object tags

• It will be critical to retain a low threshold of participation (low cognitive overhead) while allowing for user control

• Semantic resources will be autosuggested and the main input from the user would be to disambiguate when needed• Resources should come from SKOSified vocabularies like Dbpedia or Freebase

•Benchmarks:•JocondeLab

•Priority: 1•In development in eCreative

This will allow My Europeana users to tag items/records. The system will aid the user in connecting their tags to semantic resources and will index the multilingual labels of those resources for search.

Image annotations

• Creates annotations on the media items itself and thus encourages deeper interaction with the representation of the work

• Dbpedia/Freebase to be used for the entities, possibly more specialized SKOS-compliant vocabularies

• Dependent on direct media links in edm:IsShownBy• Benchmarks:

• Annotorious

•Priority: 2•In development in eCreative

This will allow My Europeana users to mark an area of an image and add an annotation (comment) to that area. Entities will be extracted from the annotation and indexed for search.

User created collections/sets

•Creates amateur-curated snackable collections with personal context•Users should be able to collaborate in the making of collections/sets•Benchmarks:

• Rijksstudio, Digital NZ sets

• See Chenchen Shen's Channels report for some excellent thoughts on user collections

•Priority: 3•In prep for development in eCreative/eAwareness

This will allow My Europeana users to create small collections of Europeana objects they select and then name, describe, tag, geotag and publish them. The collections will be made searchable and browsable in the portal and via the API. They will be shareable, embeddable and annotatable by other users.

User created object relations

• Creates meaningful connections across datasets and between objects.

• Relationship types: To be decided but Describes/DescribedBy, Depicts/DepictedBy, HasPart/IsPartOf, SameAs would be a good start (these are the ones used by Kringla)

• Complements machine-created links between objects with “communitysourced” relations

• The input of users could also be used to confirm or remove object relations created by machine algorithms

• Benchmarks:• Kringla where registered users can create typed relationships between objects (and also typed relationships with Wikipedia articles)

• Priority: 4

This will allow My Europeana users to relate Europeana objects to each other. A major outcome will be relations created between objects from different data providers and datasets.

Geotags

• Creates more fine-grained geodata and improves existing geodata • Thus improving relevance of developing geographical discovery solutions based on our metadata

• Benchmarks:• Historypin

• Priority: 5

This will allow users to relate an item to a specific plaxce on a map (or possibly multiple places). Such place tags will be treated as resources with their own identifier and will also be indexed for spatial search. A special type of geotagging is georeferencing of maps.

Correction of automatic enrichments

•Improves the quality of semantic enrichment and thus Europeana data overall

•And as an effect it improves discovery as precision of search is improved by removing false hits

•Benchmarks:•Powerhouse museum collections lets users remove machine tags

•Priority: 6 •High priority in eSounds

This will allow users to correct automatically created enrichments thus serving as a form of distributed quality control.

Correction of metadata

• Improves the overall quality of Europeana data • Benchmarks:

• ?• Issues: We can't overwrite institutional data. How to feed it back to the provider for them to officially change?• Priority: 7

This will allow users to suggest corrections of original metadata thus serving as a form of distributed quality control.

Translations

• Improves the overall quality of Europeana data and especially improves multi-lingual retrieval • Benchmarks:

• ?• Priority: 8

This will allow users to suggest translations of original metadata thus serving as a form of distributed translation service.

Liking and rating

• Liking is a good hint to ranking of search results• Rating adds hints for ranking and a sorting mechanism for end-users • Priority: 9

The most low-friction manner in which a user can annotate an object. The resulting annotations can for example be used to influence search result rankings or add further sorting mechanisms.

General requirements• Develop API-first, features will not always be supported in the Europeana portal• Only logged-in My Europeana users or authorized API-keys can annotate• Annotations are published and made searchable in (near) real-time• Community management of annotations, post-publication

• Users can flag annotations for removal with an annotation being removed from display and search if flagged by 3 different users.• Administrators can delete annotations and will have access to a dashboard for tracking and managing annotations

• Annotations as a class must be added to EDM• They must be time-stamped and linked to a user

• Annotations must be compliant with the Open Annotations Community specification• Annotations to be available for consumption via a continuous Atom/RSS-feed

Specific requirement: Annotations harvest

•Will allow collaboration with non-Europeana crowdsourcing platforms like Historypin, Waisda?, Zooniverse and Crowdcrafting/Pybossa•Priority: 1•To be developed with Historypin as part of Europeana 3.0

Europeana should develop the capability to harvest and ingest packages of annotations to existing Europeana objects. This will be piloted in collaboration with Historypin.

Non-technical dependencies

• EDM must be updated to encompass user created annotations and collections (in progress)• The Europeana Terms of Use must be reviewed and if necessary revised to take user created annotations into account• When the first annotation features are launched they should do so as part of a prepared community outreach campaign encouraging their use

System architecture

• A prototype Annotations service has been developed in Europeana Creative• Constraints:

•Must be open source•Must be developed “API-first”•Should ideally not add new major softwares to the European stack

The Europeana platform must be extended to encompass storage and (real-time) indexing of annotations and the development of a read/write Annotations API

Risks!

• Lack of firm coordination between eCreative, eSounds and eCloud leads to duplication of effort or development of software modules that become abandonware post-project• Overstretched data modelling, design and development resources causes delay in/low quality of integration and client implementations• Endless “policy” discussions on the overestimated reputational risks in user created content

• What will we do if someone annotates “Hitler’s the best. And

damned good looking as well!” Etc ad nauseaum.

Thanks for listening!