Extending the multilingual capacity of The European Library in the EDL project
Stockholm, Swedish National Library, 22-23 November 2007

Querying federated data from museums and archives in Sweden / Fredrik Palm

European Cultural Heritage institutions face two common challenges. The organization and presentation of archival information is so complex that they often restrict easy access to the material. Secondly, vast knowledge from communities of practice is often neglected. As the amount of digitized archival material published on the Internet grows, the need to create an environment where users, interest groups, archival experts and service personnel can interact gets more and more acute. To an increasing extent, the users are on the Internet while the most of the archival expertise still reside in the institutions, waiting for customers.

With these challenges in mind, the QVIZ project was started in May 2006 with partners from different universities, archival institutions and companies in Sweden, Austria, Estonia, the United Kingdom and Spain

During the first year activity focused on underlying research, system specifications and prototype design. More specifically, this work involved establishment of use cases, user scenarios, access strategies, an administrative ontology and a platform for knowledge models and collaboration. The project had its first review made by the commission in May 2007 where the technical specifications and user requirements where favoured.

As entry point to archival resources QVIZ is building a European Ontology of administrative units. These units are very closely connected to time, space and authorities (creators) of archive. Changes in administrative units over time also effect the organization of archival resources . QVIZ simplifies the entry point to archival resources using this ontology and a combination of an innovative faceted query and a map-time representation.

Furthermore, users involved are able to mark there preferred resources so other user can be guided by each other while searching through time and space to find archival resources. This without a deep understanding of the complex archival structure.

A collaborative environment are being developed in order to help users to organize and share knowledge concerning archival resources. Knowledge is kept in a traditional form of articles but more important as subject or domain classification using a RDF-ontology. Hence, QVIZ affords content-based exchange and collaboration through semantic annotation and linking of resources.

With these innovations we aim to reach family history researchers, local historians, students, educators and professionals. These target groups are chosen from interviews and discussions with archivists where the groups are mentioned as the biggest users of archives in Sweden and Estonia. While sketching these groups we try to identify their influences. We try to unveil from where they collect new information and most important from whom. There are certain prominent people who have a tendency to influence people they come in contact with, we name these people opinion leaders. We intend to find and exploit QVIZ to these opinion leaders in order for them to implement the usage of cultural heritage with the target groups. That work started from day one with including archivists and teachers in the project from the beginning. Through their involvement we secure a focus on the target groups' requirements while developing the product.

By creating a websystem that facilitates access to the archival resources we hope not only to reach the target groups but even regular internet users. Through the open way to perform research and comment findings it will be easier for people outside of the target groups to understand the sometimes complexity of the cultural heritage.