On a Thursday, November 19, 2020, INTAVIA kicked off its 3-year research and development endeavor. Pandemically correct, all partners joined for a day of remote conferencing, to initate collaboration across all work packages (link) and to define priority objectives for the first 6 months. Supported by representatives of the European Commission’s project office, we started the administrative, scholarly, and technical operationalization of INTAVIA’s mission, which includes the aims to:
- transcend siloed data and knowledge collections, to contextualize tangible CH assets, to create a more comprehensive picture of European heritage, and to enable synergies for curation and analysis.
- encourage open sharing and connecting of data and technologies from isolated databases, and enable collaboration by basing an integrated object-oriented biography data model on the input from 14 biography database projects across the world and making integration for data from these projects straight-forward.
- strengthen European cultural data curation and creation, develop more dynamic, intuitive, distributed, and synergetic technologies, and enable ongoing activities of enrichment and extension.
- provide state-of-the-art methods of Natural Language Processing in a way that scholars can apply, evaluate and help improve them.
- provide advanced visualization support for related activities (i.e., data curation and creation)—and significantly advance options of visual data analysis and communication for various user groups.
- encourage cultural heritage practitioners and humanities scholars to explore new possibilities of the latest developments in data science, text mining and visual analytics.
- facilitate digital humanities research by using a strong methodological setup to provide clear insight into provenance and data quality—and to evaluate the impact of technologies on research processes and quality.
- encourage the utilization and exploitation of European cultural data, strengthen communication and promotion, and create new market opportunities.
We expect this constellation of guiding ideas to translate into a wide range of non-trivial developments on various interconnected levels. We are looking forward to engage this mission during the next 3 years.
