Giuseppe Abbamonte
Director - Media and Data
European Commission - DG for Communications Networks, Content and Technology

Giuseppe Abbamonte was appointed Director of the Media and Data Directorate in January 2014. The Directorate is, amongst many other things, responsible for the development and follow-up of the European Big Data Strategy and the European regulatory framework on audiovisual media.
Shortly after his appointment as Director, Giuseppe delivered a major Communication  setting out the Commission's strategy on Data called "Towards a thriving data-driven economy" and set up the European Public Private Partnership on "Big Data Value.
In his former positions, he was the head of the electronic communications policy unit and then of the cybersecurity and on-line privacy unit. As part of the latter job, he  supervised and directed the elaboration of the European Cybersecurity Strategy and of a proposal for a European law on network and information security. He also has an extensive experience in complex merger cases and in consumer law.
Before joining the Commission he was an associate in an international law firm in Milan for four years (1989/1992), where he dealt mainly with commercial law and competition law.
He is the author of several publications mainly in English law magazines. 

Digital culture in Europe: embracing the opportunities of the digital world

Julien Brouillard
New media development manager - DEDALE

Senior consultant at Dédale, a European agency dedicated to social innovation, Julien Brouillard is in charge of the digital project development. Graduated in Communication and Information Science at Université Paris 8, he is a specialist in urban storytelling and focuses mainly in the development of digital tools for public mediation and consultation.
In the frame of the Citytelling project that he manages - a kit of digital solutions for city storytelling - he has developped a series of digital devices like Urban Explore - enriched urban walks with access to digital ressources in mobility, Heritage Experience - a mobile device for territorial mediation and SmartMap - a sensitive and collaborative cartography.

Urban Explore / Digital device for touristic and cultural enriched tour

Thanks to Urban Explore tool create and manage mobile apps as touristic and cultural digital guide in the context of collective or solo visits. As a complement to a speaker story (heritage expert, historian, city planner, art professional), the mobile app offers an access to the audio-visual history / memory of a place, in an original and emotional way.

Barbara Dierickx

• ATHENA - Access to Cultural Heritage Networks across Europe (2009-2011, co-WP leader on IPR);
• Linked Heritage - Coordination of Standards and Technologies for the Enrichment of Europeana (2011-2013, partner);
• DCA - Digitising Contemporary Art, a digitisation project of nearly 30.000 artworks created after 1945 to be submitted to Europeana (2011-2013, project coordinator and WPleader on partner network) – see http://www.dca-project.eu;
• CEST (Cultureel Erfgoed Standaarden Toolbox), creation of a toolbox of standards for digitisation, digital archiving and interoperability, available at http://www.projectcest.be (ongoing);
• AthenaPlus, co-WPleader on Creative applications for the re-use of cultural content (2013-2015);
• EuropeanaSpace, task leader on demonstrators for educational use of digital cultural content & co-WPleader on IPR (ongoing);

City-Quest, School Trip, Movio-APP, Movio Hub: new tools for reusing digital cultural heritage

The AthenaPlus project contributed information on close to 3 million digital objects to Europeana. The aggregation of this information is only one way of re-using it, but there is much more potential. In the project, we developed specific tools for digital hertage re-use that were aimed at interested parties in heritage, tourism and education. In this presentation we present some of these tools, which are now publicly available as open source software."

Mario Fois

Mario Fois, graduated in graphic design from the Istituto Superiore Industrie Artistiche of Urbino. He works in the field of visual design and various areas of visual communication.
In the 1980-90 s he cooperated with numerous exhibitions and successively with numerous advertising agencies. He also held the position of Art director at Young & Rubicam in Rome.
In 1999 he’s co-founder of Vertigo Design and has produced design work for such customers as Auditorium – Parco della Musica, the Municipality of Roma, MAXXI, Ferrovie dello Stato, Agenzia del Demanio, P&G, the Authority for Data Privacy, Finmeccanica, Alenia Spazio, Alenia Marconi System, Telespazio, Merck, Fandango Cinema, Intralot, Fincantieri, Unicef and many others beside.
From 2003 he teaches Graphic Design and Visual Communication for a degree course in Industrial Design, at the University of Roma “La Sapienza”, at ISIA Roma Design and at Rufa Rome University of Fine Arts.
He is a frequent contributor to the magazines “Progetto Grafico” – of which he is also an editor – and “diid– disegno industriale”
He is also a member of AIAP and BEDA.

The experience of two universities using the AthenaPlus creative tools. How students can benefit from the results of European projects

In the context of the Athena Plus project, ISIA Roma Design and ICCU have close a Cooperation Agreement for the development of the graphical interface of the portal open-source 'MOVIO - virtual online exhibition'.  In the first phase implemented, the students of the II° year of the degree specialist in 'Design of systems' have made of the innovative proposals for existing 'virtual museums' produced with the platform.

Prof. Monika Hagedorn-Saupe

Prof. Monika Hagedorn-Saupe studied mathematics, sociology, psychology, and adult education at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, at Kings College London, and at the Freie Universität Berlin. Since 1994, she has been Head of the department "Visitor-related museum research and museum statistics" in the Institut for Museum Research. She is responsible for several European projects and acts as the Deputy Director of the Institute.

Since 1997 she chairs the Special Interest Group on Documentation (Fachgruppe Dokumentation) in the German museum association (Deutscher Museumsbund e.V.) and the working rgoup "information centers" in CIDOC, the documentation committee in ICOM. Currently She is Viice-president of the MICHAEL Association, a board member of ICOM-Europe and represents museums associations at the Europeana Foundation. Since 2006 she is Honorary Professor at the University of Applied Science HTW in Berlin and teaches museology, visitor research and terminology.

Alessandro Lenci

Alessandro Lenci PhD, is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics at the University of Pisa, where he directs the Computational Linguistics Laboratory (Coling Lab: http://colinglab.fileli.unipi.it/). His main research areas include computational semantics, information extraction, tools and resources for Natural Language Processing and Digital Humanities. Prof. Lenci teaches Computational Linguistics at the University of Pisa. He has been the co-organizer of various workshops and conferences, and authored several publications appeared in international conferences and journals.

Multilingual access to European cultural heritage: The role of Human Language Technology

The preservation and promotion of European cultural heritage requires an intense and laborious work of digitization. The increasing availability of digital documents, however, calls for advanced technologies to optimize the management and access to document collections. The aim of computational linguistics is to develop Human Language Technologies for the extraction, management, retrieval, exploration and analysis of information in digital texts. In this communication, I will discuss the potentialities offered by Human Language Technologies to enhance multilingual access to European cultural heritage.

Rosa Maiello

Rosa Maiello is a librarian and an expert in law. She is in charge atUniversity ofNaples "Parthenope" as Library director, Records Manager and Responsible of the Archive.
Rosa is the chair of the AIB Observatory on Copyright and Open Access of the Italian Library Association (Associazione Italiana Biblioteche – Gruppo di lavoro su Diritto d’autore e Open Access) and a member of the EBLIDA-EGIL Grop (European Bureau of Library Information and Documentation Associations – Expert Group on Information Law).
She took part in several conferences and courses on Copyright and Information law.

Reuse of digital cultural contents: opportunities for cultural institutions also in relation to Europeana

As part of the Digital Agenda for 2020 that continues some targets already identified during the previous ten-year action plan of the EU for the development of Europeana, some recent Directives and Recommendations of the European Union aim to support digitization, cross-border access and re-use of cultural heritage, conceived as the point of convergence of all the digital libraries in the Member States, a fundamental source of learning, inspiration, and new creativity susceptible of multiple applications, from scientific research to tourism.

This speech focuses on the opportunities offered by Directive 2012/28 / EU on certain permitted uses of orphan works, the Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2011 by the representatives of European Libraries and Publishers for the digitization of out of print works, the Directive 2013/37 / EU, which amended the Directive 2003/98 / EC on the re-use of public sector information, and on the commitment of the European Union for the open access to the results of  publicly funded scientific research. Finally, it takes in account the current debate on the copyright reform and certain proposals which could foster both mass-digitization projects and the dynamic role of digital libraries and Europeana in supporting cultural promotion, e-democracy and open science.

Joris Pekel

Joris Pekel works as a community coordinator cultural heritage at the Europeana Foundation. His academic work covers theatre, film, new media and digital heritage studies in Utrecht and Amsterdam. At Europeana he closely works together with memory institutions to open up cultural heritage data for everybody to enjoy and reuse. He is also coordinator of the OpenGLAM Network that promotes free and open access to digital cultural heritage held by Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) and brings together organisations, institutions and individuals that share this goal

Europeana and the future: new perspectives for cultural institutions publishing their collections on the web

Europeana today is 7 years old. In those 7 years a number of great things have been achieved. Over 45 million records from 3,500 institutions from all over Europe can now be found in the Europeana database and can be accessed via the portal and the API by users all over the world.
At the same time we find ourselves in quite a different situation compared to 2008. Technology has radically changed the way we access information and users expect a lot more from digital products both from content andfindability, but also how it is presented. The cultural heritage sector needs to adapt to that, which is not an easy task.
During this talk a number of developments that will shape the future of the digital landscape will be discussed and Europeana’s plans how to respond to these changes will be presented. After this there is room for discussion and questions.

Christophe Roche
Condillac Research Group – LISTIC Lab.
Université de Savoie – France

Christophe Roche - University of Savoie (France): Christophe Roche is Full Professor at the University of Savoie, France, and Associate Researcher at the Linguistic Research Center of the New University of Lisbon, Portugal. He is in charge of the Condillac Research Group on “Ontology and Terminology”. His main domains of interest are knowledge engineering and ontology, terminology and linguistics, and their applications. Involved into several European projects on Terminology and Ontology, Christophe Roche is also the Project leader of the two ISO Standards on Vocabulary, Principles, and Methods of Terminology (ISO 704 and ISO 1087). 

Terminologies and multilingualism: opportunities for cultural institutions from using the AthenaPlus Terminology Management Platform

Making collections accessible to users speaking different languages and/or using different thesauri raises two main issues. The first one is about multilingualism when people use different words for describing the same item. The second one is about multi-conceptualization when people classify a same item under different concepts. Following the recommendations of the last version of the ISO 25964-1 Standard on Thesaurus putting forward concept (“a thesaurus should first list all the concepts […] in a given domain”), the AthenaPlus Terminology Management Platform is ontology-oriented – an ontology is a formal specification of a conceptualization which aims to be a (natural) language independent representation.  By distinguishing the two conceptual and linguistic dimensions of Thesaurus the TMP2 enables to share a same conceptualization of a domain whatever the language, i.e. to build multilingual thesauri. It also enables mapping thesauri through the alignment of their ontologies, linking ideas (concepts) rather than words (labels), in order to link together multilingual collections. Based on ontology, emphasis is given to concept definition and their relationships – the TMP2 handles concepts and objects (instances) as well as generic, part-of, and instance-of relations – independently of the way the thesaurus will be exported. Thus, if thesauri can be exported in SKOS for example, the TMP2 does not rely on SKOS which is first of all an interchange format and not a modelling language. On the other hand, importing SKOS thesauri means translating the input thesaurus into a consistent ontology. This phase is carried out under verifying logic properties, a task which can be time-consuming for huge thesauri.
The second part of the talk will be dedicated to the presentation of the functionalities of the TMP2 illustrated by an example, building a new thesaurus from beginning to end.

Gino Roncaglia

Gino Roncaglia is Associate Professor and Director of the University Master in e-Learning and of the Advanced course on the future of the book at Tuscia University, Viterbo, and member of the Committee on libraries and cultural institutes of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage. He is strategic consultant for the Cultural division of the Italian State TV Broadcaster RAI and has been scientific consultant and author of a number of TV programs on new media from 1996 onwards He has also been teaching university and master level courses on new media and digital humanities at the Universities of Florence and Venezia “Ca’ Foscari”. He authored a number of scholarly books and articles both in the field of History of Logic and in the field of Digital Humanities, including the textbook on new media Il mondo digitale with Fabio Ciotti (Bari, Laterza, first ed. 2001, 14^th ed. 2015). He also co-authored the best-selling Italian manual on the use of the Internet “Internet – Manuale per l’uso della rete” (Bari, Laterza, 5 editions and 22 reprints between 1996 and 2004). His latest book is La quarta rivoluzione. Sei lezioni sul futuro del libro (Bari, Laterza 2010). 

Digital Storytelling and Content curation

The talk will discuss the concept of digital storytelling from a mainly historical point of view: the problem of constructing narratives integrating spoken, written, audio and visual content is clearly not a new one, and quick glance to its history – from the discussion of the relationship between orality and literacy in the ancient world up to contemporary multimedia – could help to better understand some of the features of digital storytelling, and (hopefully) shed some light on how to effectively use it in the contest of cultural heritage and content curation.

Valentina Vassallo
The Cyprus Institute - STARC

Valentina is a research assistant in Digital Heritage at the Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center of the Cyprus Institute (Cyprus). She works on the definition of a knowledge communication framework for data management and communication process of digital cultural heritage assets through new ways of reasoning with information technologies and metadata. Valentina holds a M.A. in Conservation of Cultural Heritage (Classical Archaeology) and a M.A. in Conservation and Management of Cultural Heritage. She is currently a dual PhD candidate in Classical Studies at the University of Lund (Sweden) and in Digital Cultural Heritage at the Cyprus Institute.

Data aggregation: state of the art and new perspectives. The case study of the Cyprus’ aggregator within AthenaPlus project.

Recent researches state that 90% of our Cultural Heritage has not been digitised yet. While institutions continue in this task, the current issue should be how to make this 10% useful for enhancing knowledge. In a world inundated with more information than we can process, how to access and use all this information? How to efficiently explore it? How to generate new knowledge and share it? The possible solution is the transformation from searchable repositories to knowledge environments. The Cyprus Institute-STARC, as national aggregator within the AthenaPlus project, has developed a repository where the centre are the users with their experience, knowledge and cognitive apparatus. A source for data aggregation to enhance information and knowledge retrieval and a basis for developing tools to experiment on new ways of interacting with data and stimulating knowledge creation.