The conference began with a welcome message  from Prof. Ioannis Vassiliou, Director of ICCS. Then the session’s  moderator Prof. Stefanos Kollias, Director of  Intelligent Systems, Content and Interaction Laboratory provided the context of the event and the focus of the session, which was

“creative reuse and all the different  ways we can access and reuse the available  digital  content”.

The first talk was given by Alexis Panagiotopoulos, Representative of Ministry of Economy,  providing information about Open data, core element of NSRF (ΕΣΠΑ) administration and prerequisites  for NSRF projects.

Then Vassilis Tzouvaras, Senior researcher at NTUA,  leading the development in MINT  and WITH activities, gave a talk about “The age of reuse and user engagement: Enrichment and participation in digital culture”.

Age of reuse and user engagement

Ioanna-Ourania Stathopoulou & Haris Georgiadis representing National Documentation Center presented  an ecosystem consisting of an Aggregator of Cultural Heritage Content (http://searchculture.gr), a Metadata and Digital File Validation System and an Information System for Semantic Vocabularies and Contextual Enrichment (http://semantics.gr). The ecosystem was developed by National Documentation Center so as to provide  homogenized content subject to validation , data clearing and semantic enrichment thus  enhancing the user experience and search / explore capabilities.

Unified search of digital cultural content: searching culture.

In the last presentation of the session, Athanasios Drosopoulos, Senior researcher at NTUA,  leading the development in MINT  and WITH activities, introduced the newly established collaborative and interoperable WITH platform for creative reuse  and the related  Europeana Space project activities.

Communicating culture WITH an interoperable platform for creative reuse of digital cultural heritage

The session ended with questions addressed from attendees to speakers.

In this  session, moderated by  Vassilis Tzouvaras, the speakers explored the experience of digital culture following  different paths of Europeana projects.

The first talk comprised of two presentations, aiming to disseminate the experience gained through EUscreenXL and Europeana Sounds projects. Arne Stabenau, senior developer at NTUA, presented EUscreenXL, the sequel of EUscreen network that functions as an expert hub in which archival organizations from different cultural and professional backgrounds experiment with the various possibilities of online publishing.

Watching and listening to culture: the case of EUscreenXL project

Nikos Simou, Senior Researcher at NTUA, presented Europeana Food and Drink and Europeana Sounds projects, and disseminated the results and the experienced gained and the lessons learnt via the participation in these projects.

Watching and listening to culture: the cases of Europeana Dood and Drink & Europeana Sounds projects

Then, Marco Rendina, founder and CTO of the Europeana Fashion International Association, presented Europeana Fashion that brings together more than 30 public and private archives and museums, coming from 13 European countries, in order to collect and give public access to more than 750.000 high-quality digital fashion objects, available for all to enjoy and re-use.

Digital cultural heritage with style: the Europeana Fashion project

also available at slideshare

Dimitris Gavrilis, Scientific Associate at the Digital Curation Unit (DCU) of Athena Research Centre, presented MORe, a curation-oriented metadata aggregator that enable users to create their own enrichment plans that best suit their data,  choose among a number of readily available enrichment micro-services and configure them without any programming knowledge.

Do you want to find out MORe?

The session ended with questions from the audience to speakers.

This session, moderated by Alexandra Nikiforidou,  provided a taste of culture by exploring the paradigm of food and drink in digital culture.

Vasia Pierrou, Project & Communications Manager at PostScriptum,  introduced the  Europeana Food and Drink project and its achievements, emphasizing  the importance of the reuse of European culinary cultural heritage content.

Europeana Food and Drink and the Attica Wine Trail

The National Historical Museum is now in the digital era and is exploring the potential of openness in cultural data management. In this context and while Europeana Food and Drink doesn’t appear to be part of the themes that would interest a traditional National Museum,  Philipos Mazarakis who is the  coordinator of the digital activities of the museum , tried to expand the thematic spectrum of National Historical Museum’s collections and reinterpret its assets.

The value of providing content

In the next talk, Efi Agathonikou who is a Collections Manager at the National Gallery,  presented National Gallery’s experience and benefits gained from participating in the enrichment of digital content contributed to Europeana.

Digital print of National Gallery

The session ended with questions addressed from the audience.

This session, moderated by Natasa Sofou, explored ways of creatively reusing digital cultural content from museums and art.

Prodromos Tsiavos,  Head of Digital Development at the Onassis Cultural Centre, talked about the re-use of open educational resources and the way it is often approached as a single trajectory and platform process. However, practice shows that their actual re-use happens in a rather fragmented and often anarchic fashion, which, nevertheless makes use of standard platforms that operate as islands of stability in a sea of constantly changing modes of content reuse. The objective of the talk was to show how the use of wikipedia, standard online platforms and open source software could be deployed in order to produce a consistent digital strategy and experience with regards to the re-use of open digital content.

A multi-modal approach for the development of Open Educational Material | The Case of the Onassis Cultural Centre

Kostas Konstantinidis, director and founder of PostScriptum, presented MuseumPlus – a platform  vital to the virtuous life cycle of cultural data- and the reuse of cultural content.  MuseumPlus with more than 450.000 Greek collection exhibits  is the most widely used collection management system in Greece. and applications can be built upon MuseumPlus curated content.

MuseumPlus and the reuse of cultural content

Then two young entrepreneurs from the creative industries presented their   newly  founded applications.

Heracles  Papatheodorou, co-founder of City Tales,  presented City Tales  and how it can  enhance the way we experience cities, either as locals or tourists.

City Tales | Ubiquitous culture and cities

Andreas Fatouros, Andreas is the co-founder and art Specialist and researcher at Clio Muse, presented Clio Muse,  an awarded tour-guide application for indoor tours and city walks, that curates cultural stories according to a specific methodology.

Clio Muse | Appetite for culture

The session ended with questions from the audience and wrapping-up the  outcome of the event.