CIPHER Project Summary - The Application Goals

The application goal of the project was to develop four CH Forums that will serve for testing the CIPHER methodology and technology. The four CH Forums produced were organised around: Irish cultural and natural heritage, Nordic heritage through storytelling and historical artefacts, the shared heritage of central Europe, and the tradition of technology innovation in south central England.

Irish Cultural and Natural Heritage

This forum comprise of heritage institutions having wide ranging collections, around the overall forum theme. Content includes archaeological data relating primarily to Ireland. The forum was developed as a joint effort of DIT and the Discovery Programme. DIT provided the technological support and the Discovery Programme provided the content. The methodology was developed in collaboration of both partners.

Results

The forum has been implemented and tested in two trials. An overview of these trials is presented in the project trial reports D13 (http://cipherweb.open.ac.uk/d13/) and D25. The forum is supported and operational. The users were pre-historians, medieval historians and archaeologists. An example taken from the domain used in this forum is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Mooghaun Hillfort in North Munster, Ireland

Nordic Heritage through Storytelling and Historical Artefacts

The forum is focused on the tradition of storytelling as a reflection of and a means for conveying Nordic culture. The heritage content drew inspiration from the Carta Marina, a historical map of Nordic regions dated to year 1539. The technology and methodology was developed by UIAH, the content was developed in collaboration with the Harkko Museum in Raisio, Finland.

Results

The forum has been implemented and tested in two trials. The user group in the second trial consisted of student and teachers. The overview of these trials is presented in deliverables D13 and D25. The novelty of this application was to use soft ontologies as navigation tools. A part of Carta Marina is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. The Carta Marina map

Shared Heritage of Central Europe

This forum explores the long common history of the regions of Southern Bohemia and Upper Austria. The forum content was planned to include collections from castles and museums, the forum supports the work of the regional heritage care organisation and regional libraries.

Results

Due to the interest from a number of heritage bodies and interest groups the forum was extended to additional areas. They include the architecture of chapels in rural Southern Bohemia, baroque palaces in Prague, the Historical Guild Schwarzenberg and Southern Bohemian Legends. An example of an annotated picture from the Prague palaces area is shown in Figure 3. As explained in section 3.5 below, the domain of South Bohemian Legends was initially developed as a demonstrator for technology re-use (http://cipherweb.open.ac.uk/legend/) but grew to become a separate application used in the shared heritage of central Europe forum (http://krizik.felk.cvut.cz/cwl2/bp-explore/).

Figure 3. Annotating picture of a palace gate.

Tradition of technology innovation in South Central England

The south central region of England has a distinguished history in technology innovation, including the development of early computing and communication technologies, and is still a locus of innovation. This forum supports the exploration of these important events up to modern times and is also being used to support research into the nature of scientific discovery.

Results

The content of the forum is provided by the Bletchley Park Museum and relates to wartime code-breaking and early computing. This forum focused on supporting a group of about 35 Bletchley Park tour guides investigative and promotional work for the museum. About 80 interviews with World War II code breakers were recorded, annotated and stored in a database which can be accessed through a web-based exploration tool called Story Fountain. Early experiments with the Story Fountain system indicated that these annotated resources could be used to generate interesting dynamic narratives that supported the exploration of the existing content. As a result, the forum was extended and a further system to support visitors to the Park was developed. An example of the Story Fountain exploration tool used by the guides in Bletchley Park is shown in Figure 4 (left). An example screen view of the Bletchley Park Mobile Information Service built using the story fountain system is shown in Figure 4 (right).

Figure 4. The story exploration tool used by guides at Bletchley Park (shown here on the left) and the Bletchley Park Mobile Information Service available for visitors (shown on the right).

Additional Applications

In addition to the anticipated applications in the four CH Forums the following applications were developed. They were produced either to verify the features supported through our software, or as a response to the interest shown by some communities after public presentations.

1. South Bohemian Legends

This application was used to verify the reusability of the tools and methodology produced in one of the forums, by applying it in a domain completely different to the original. The Story Fountain system was designed to support the exploration process of the Bletchley Park guides and reapplied in the shared heritage of central Europe forum to support the exploration of medieval South Bohemian legends.

Results

The application was developed in response to a request from the Institute of Monument Care in Southern Bohemia. The necessary semantic annotations were made by the Czech Technical University, the application was developed by The Open University and the Czech Technical University (CTU) and is maintained by CTU. The annotation of the new content took a few days. Integrating the content with the existing tool was completed in about 6 hours. An example of the South Bohemian Legend forum is shown in Figure 5, access to the system is available at http://krizik.felk.cvut.cz/cwl2/bp-explore/

Figure 5. South Bohemian Legends - an example of tool reuse

2. Community Story Exchange and Scooter.

The Community Story Exchange (CSE) is a generic tool for collecting digital heritage content.

Results

The tool was implemented by The Open University and instantiated in Bletchley Park Forum for collecting and sharing information in the community of guides and in a new area of the south central England forum called Scooter, for communication and collaboration between schools in two different counties. The participating schools were Denbigh School in Milton Keynes (UK) and Gymnazium Jiriho Gutha-Jarkovskeho in Prague (Czech Republic). Scooter is running on a server at The Open University. Denbigh School was supported by The Open University and Gymnazium Jiriho Gutha-Jarkovskeho by the Czech technical University. Depending on the context, the Scooter software allows users to choose from a number of communication models (described further in section 5). Two examples of pages from the Scooter site are shown in Figure 6. As a result of the dissemination carried out in the project, about a half a dozen new schools have recently shown interest in joining the Scooter project.

Figure 6. The Scooter home page (left) and an example of a story taken from the site (right)