A Taste of Cyprus's Cultural Heritage

There is a pressing need to define approaches and solutions to preserving, managing, visualising and disseminating Cultural Heritage both in Europe and globally. By achieving these goals, we would be much better placed to appreciate not only how common history is shared across nations but also the rich diversity that exists across the board. EuroMed 2010, an international conference on Digital Heritage, takes place 8-13 November in Cyprus. The event aims to offer a forum for sharing views and experiences, discussing initiatives and best practices, as well as the technical tools needed to preserve and manage cultural heritage in the digital age. The event shines the spotlight on current initiatives at national, European and international level as well as projects funded by private organisations.

Against this backdrop, DL.org is presenting its findings on interoperability, a complex concept along a wide multidimensional spectrum, encompassing data and metadata interoperability on the one side and  organisational, legal and policy interoperability on the other. DL.org is presenting a recent paper entitled “Building Large hetereogeneous interconnected Digital Library Infrastructures: The Interoperability Challenge”, co-authored by DL.org co-ordinating partners, Costantino Thanos, Donatella Castelli and Leonardo Candela from the Institute of Information Science and Technologies at the National Research Council of Italy. Costantino Thanos is representing the project at EuroMed 2010 along with a poster display. The paper focuses on:

• Describing a number of application scenarios where several interoperability issues are outlined.
• Defining interoperability and identifying impediments to interoperability between federated Digital Libraries.
  Presenting approaches to achieving interoperability.
• Identifying and describing several types of interoperability.
• Concluding remarks on best practices for implementing interoperability solutions.

“A common reference model for Digital Libraries would be a significant contribution to the community by providing a foundation for best practices and common standards as people are developing their Digital Libraries ad hoc and trying to figure out the right way to do it.” Geneva Henry, Rice University, member of DL.org’s External Advisory Board.

“There is a strong need for a common Reference Model  and if nothing else, we’ve learned from our conversations this afternoon and experience over the last ten years how complex this undertaking is, so I don’t want to suggest this is a simple process but a dialogue since the DELOS Network of Excellence started, so it’s incredibly complex and important, as we have pointed out today. The more we delve into it, the more rich and complex it is. It is incredibly important.” Ronald Larsen, University of Pittsburgh.
“DL.org is definitely moving in the right direction. It’s tackling a problem that is huge and it’s not easy to even begin to tackle all these issues on an interoperability level. When you start talking about policy, quality, users, architectures and functionality, all these areas require a tremendous amount of work, delving into and figuring out how they work together in a way that ensures Digital Libraries can talk together, exchange information and really be something for the end-users and where they do not have to worry about how it works.” Geneva Henry, Rice University, member of DL.org’s External Advisory Board.

“DL.org has already pulled together the leaders in this space, particularly in Europe and particularly in the U.S., but there are people here today from Asia and South Africa, as well. I think that launching the conversation at places like this is incredibly important, providing opportunities for people to interact together. I was going through the DL.org pamphlet and listening to the talks this afternoon and this is by far the most comprehensive attempt yet to capture the whole space for DL research and development that needs to be done. I think it will become “the” forum for considering that.” Ronald Larsen, University of Pittsburgh.