challenges on modeling annotations in the europeana sounds project

Challenges on modeling annotations in the Europeana Sounds projectHugo Manguinhas, Sergiu Gordea, Antoine Isaac, Alessio Piccioli, Giulio Andreini, Francesca Di Donato, Remy Gardien, Maarten Brinkerink | iAnnotate 2016

What is Europeana?

Challenges on modeling annotations in the Europeana Sounds projectCC BY-SA

We aggregate metadata:

• From all EU countries

• 3,500 galleries, libraries, archives and museums

• More than 52M objects

• In about 50 languagesEuropeana aggregation infrastructure

Europeana| CC BY-SA

The Platform for Europe’s Digital Cultural Heritage

http://pro.europeana.eu/share-your-data/

Why are annotations useful?

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For Users, a means to…• Contribute with their knowledge• Discuss and share their knowledge with others

For Cultural Institutions, a new way and opportunity to increase the quality of their metadata • Improve consistency• Contribute to a better semantic description, with internal

cross-linking and links to the web of data

Challenges on modeling annotations in the Europeana Sounds project

The Europeana Sounds project

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Europeana Sounds aims to increase the amount of audio content available via Europeana

• also improving geographical and thematic coverage

Apart from aggregation, it improves discovery and use of audio content, by enriching metadata through innovative methods


Annotation Scenarios in Europeana Sounds

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A user annotates a Cultural Heritage Object, in particular…• Information describing the object (i.e. metadata)

• Contextual information (i.e. metadata about Agents, Places, Subjects, … )

• Media resources representing the object

By the following actions:• Tag with terms from controlled vocabularies• Complete or correct information• Favour or moderate annotations made by other

users• Comment and discuss with other users• Relate objects together


Crowdsourcing Infrastructure

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Annotation Providers

Annotation Client

TheSession.org + TunePal

HistoryPin.org Pundit WITH

Exchanging annotations across platforms

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We adopted the W3C Web Annotation Data Model• Offers a simple model for exchanging annotations across

platforms... but flexible enough to support complex scenarios

We are developing a REST API based on the W3C Web Annotation Protocol• Which developers & Europeana will use for retrieval,

creation and search of annotations


http://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/

https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-protocol/

Tagging with semantic resources

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User scenario:A end-user wishes to tag a Europeana object using a term/resource from a controlled vocabulary


Item as displayed in theEuropeana Collections

Portal

Antoine Isaac

Actually re-reading after seeing Maarten's comment on sl 12, I think sl 8, 9 and 10 may be too generic. One doesn't see what kind of objects are being annotated, what semantic tags are (which vocabulary? even an example would help, not necessary all the vocs Sounds may be interested in)

Tagging with semantic resourcesThe Pundit use case

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DBpediaAPI

oa:Annotationhttp://

data.europeana.eu/annotation/...

oa:hasBody

skos:Concepthttp://dbpedia.org/resource/

Brass_instrument

oa:taggingoa:motivatedBy

edm:ProvidedCHOhttp://data.europeana.eu/item/09102/

_UEDIN_214

oa:hasTarget

Available Vocabularies/ Datasets

Tagging with semantic resourcesOpen Questions

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… some aspects may significantly influence user experience:

• Should different kinds of semantic resources be displayed in the same way? ...or should they be differentiated by type (ie. a Place vs Agent) or scope (e.g. Rock as a sound genre vs a physical thing).

• Which label(s) should be displayed? Should the one that best fits the display settings (ie. language preferences) be used - what if no label exists for that language?

• Should the user annotate with any term from a vocabulary, or only a subset?

• What to do with annotations when a vocabulary is updated by its maintainer?


Tagging with semantic resourcesChallenges

Client applications must: • have all data necessary for feeding the display and • in an way that they can uniformly process

This means that resources must be:• Dereferenced• Translated into an uniform data format

To tackle these challenges we chose the Europeana Data Model:• Already in use at Europeana• Reuses existing standards (e.g. SKOS, DublinCore, WGS84 Geo

Positioning)

• Gives support for all contextual resources CC BY-SA


Tagging with geographical informationThe HistoryPin.org use case

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User can specify the rough coordinates and a radius

An Europeana Object displayed in HistoryPin.org

Tagging with geographical informationThe HistoryPin.org use case

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{ "@context": "http://www.w3.org/ns/anno.jsonld", "id": "http://data.europeana.eu/annotations/historypin/136290", ... [provenance info here], ... "motivation": "tagging", "body": { "@context": <Context for EDM>, "type": "edm:Place", "wgs84_pos:lat": "48.85341", "wgs84_pos:long": "2.3488" }, "target": "http://data.europeana.eu/item/09102/_UEDIN_214"}

Similar as semantic tagging but using a “virtual” resource

Coordinates expressed using WGS84 Geo

Positioning

Annotating metadataThe Pundit use case

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We consider metadata annotations as…• any annotation that refers to or asserts a statement to the

information describing an object in order to complete or correct it

Ideally, and like other annotations, they should be• agnostic to the way they are presented to the user in the

interface• machine readable

So that metadata annotations can• survive changes to the interface design;• allow them to be easily shared outside the interface they

were originally created;• allow for other software applications to take further

advantage of it


Annotating metadataA Proposal

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oa:Annotationhttp://

data.europeana.eu/annotation/...

oa:describing?

oa:motivatedBy

pundit:MetadataSelector

#statement1

oa:SpecificResource

#metadata1

oa:hasTargetoa:hasSelector

rdf:predicate

Graph

Correct URIedm:ProvidedCHO

http://data.europeana.eu/item/09102/_UEDIN_214

dcterms:isPartOf

oa:hasSource

rdf:value

oa:hasBody

A specific motivation may

be needed

Similar to a rdf:Statement but

following WA guidelines

Favouring and moderating annotations

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As manual per-annotation moderation does not scale well, we wish to encourage a crowd-moderation policy among the end-users:• Three-strikes-out: if three users report an

annotation as in violation of the terms of use, it will be hidden.

How to differentiate moderation (violations of terms of use) from up- and down-voting ('this is a very good annotation, +1')?


Conclusion

• Requirements are becoming clearer as we work on more concrete use-cases and validate them with real users

• Expressing cross-platform annotations in an uniform way is a big challenge:• W3C Web Annotation Data Model gives a good

interoperable base• But, not all scenarios are yet covered• Need for best practices for specific applications /

domains

• Still a lot of work ahead......but we are making progress

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http://www.europeanasounds.eu/

challenges on modeling annotations in the europeana sounds project

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