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Publications in Scientific Journals:

S. Verstockt, K. Milleville, D. Ali, F. Porras Bernárdez, G. Gartner, N. van de Weghe:
"EURECA - EUropean Region Enrichment in City Archives and collections";
e-Perimetron, 16 (2021), 2; 63 - 71.



English abstract:
The interdisciplinary EURECA project follows the trends towards location-based services and personalized/contextualized content, and investigates them in the context of cultural heritage collections of European city archives. EURECA focuses on finding traces of European regions that have shaped the cities in which we live today and develops tools to easily explore them when visiting a city. The spatio-temporal metadata that is automatically generated by our tools can be used as input to perform new fundamental research and applied studies, but also to facilitate the exploitation of the collections to a broader public and attract new groups of cultural heritage consumers. LBS that run on top of our enrichments, for example, will allow tourists to explore the traces of a specific European region (e.g. Austria) in the city (e.g. Ghent) and show them the collection items at their corresponding point of interest (POI) using their mobile device. These connections that link Austria to Ghent (for example) can be rather diverse, such as architectural traces, art, place and street names, and memories of foreign academics. Different media-types, such as handwritten student/foreigner registers, pictures, newspapers, and wiki pages, are investigated. Natural language processing (NLP), computer vision and semantic intelligence techniques are the computational tools that are combined to automatically enrich the media items and link them to a particular Region of Origin (RoO). Furthermore, to get an idea about what cultural heritage items are popular by visitors from a particular region of origin, we also query social media platforms and generate RoO heatmaps of the cultural heritage points of interest (POIs) of today. These heatmaps can be compared across different regions or over different periods in time using standard and advanced GIS-techniques.

Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.