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CIPHER - Project Exploitation Plan: Trial applications
During the project, four Cultural Heritage forums have been developed by the project partners. They are:
Irish Cultural and Natural Heritage
For this application, DIT provided the technological support, Discovery Programme provided the content which includes archaeological data relating primarily to Ireland. The methodology was developed in collaboration by both partners. The application is called Irish Explorer (explorer.ie ) and after the end project it is supported by both DIT and Discovery Programme.
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Irish student surveying a ruined monastery in Co. Roscommon (left) and students using the Irish explorer forum (right)
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There are a number of user groups of the explorer software:
- Archaeological & Historical interest groups - These include local groups who use the forum to explore historical cultural data with the aim of expanding their own group's knowledge and also to share their opinions and perspectives with a larger community. Many Irish interest groups exist abroad.
- Students and teachers - The forum stories have provided the necessary dynamic support structures to aid learning and to add fresh perspectives to existing knowledge. Students are able to use the forum to increase their knowledge for specific course work and educational assignments.
Nordic Heritage through Storytelling and Historical Artefacts
The forum is focused on the tradition of storytelling as reflection and as a means of conveying Nordic culture. The heritage content drew and is inspired by a historical map of Nordic regions Carta Marina dated to year 1539. The technology and methodology was developed by UIAH (see http://cipher.uiah.fi) , the content was developed in collaboration with the Harkko Museum in Raisio, Finland.
Carta Marina 1539
The Forum is used to deliver:
- Digital cultural heritage objects - These replicas, which are developed using standard digital technology, are available to users through any web browser. The project features the first online, interactive version of the Carta Marina.
- Visualization tool to display and interact with the heritage objects - The project has developed its own visualization tool that allows for display and interaction with high-quality digital heritage objects.
- Interpretive materials and content materials - The project has gathered interpretive materials that can now be used for education, or to stimulate the creation of other interpretive materials.
- Resource organization and navigation tools - The tools developed allow users to process their data in order to promote exploration and knowledge discovery. They can use the Automatic Description Engine (ADE) tool to process large amounts of textual data such as those found in manuscripts or in encyclopaedic works into similarity clusters. Clusters themselves can reveal relationships in the data. Using the Soft Ontology Layer (SOL) they can describe or create collections of artefacts that can then be visualized using self-organizing maps technology.
Shared Heritage of Central Europe
This forum explores the long common history of Southern Bohemia and Upper Austria regions. Due to the interest from a number of heritage bodies and interest groups the forums were extended to additional areas. They include the architecture of chapels in the rural Southern Bohemia, baroque palaces in Prague and the Historical Guild Schwarzenberg.
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An example of a chapel in Southern Bohemia (left), and the annotation of a picture of a palace gate (right)
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Reusability of the CIPHER Story Fountain tool (see later) and upper ontologies in a new domain was tested on medieval South Bohemian legends. All of the tools developed by CTU for the CIPHER project and the South Bohemian legends application can be found at http://krizik.felk.cvut.cz/cipher.
Tradition of technology innovation in South Central England
This area has a distinguished history in technology innovation, including the development of computing and engineering technologies, and still remains a locus of innovation. The forum allows exploration of these important events up to modern times, including supporting research into the nature of scientific discovery. About 120 interviews of WWII code breakers were recorded, annotated and saved in the database of the navigation and presentation tool called Story Fountain. Different versions of Story Fountain have been implemented for the Bletchley Park tour guides and for visitors. An example of the Story Fountain for the guides is shown in Figure 4.
Retrieving interviews in Bletchley Park
Community Story Exchange and Scooter
Community Story Exchange is a generic tool for collecting digital heritage content. The tool was implemented by the Open University and instantiated for the following applications: in Bletchley Park Forum for collecting and sharing information in the community of guides and in a new forum, called Scooter, for communication and collaboration between two schools in two different counties. The participating schools are the Denbigh School in Milton Keynes, UK and Gymnazium Jiriho Gutha-Jarkovskeho in Prague, Czech Republic. Examples of Scooter pages are shown in Figure 6.
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Scooter home page and a story submitted by a group of children about their observation of Venus.
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Scooter and the other applications can be accessed from the CIPHER project forums page
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