Oreste Signore- Quality/1 Amman, December 2006 Standards for quality of cultural websites Ministerial NEtwoRk for Valorising Activities in digitisation

Oreste Signore- Quality/2 Amman, December 2006 Quality: what is it?  Easy perception  Difficult to measure  Metrics  User experience  Usability  Maintanability ...

Oreste Signore- Quality/3 Amman, December 2006 Quality factors  Transparency (easily identifiable)  Portability (adaptable, light)  Interoperability  Data structuring

Oreste Signore- Quality/4 Amman, December 2006 Interoperability (technological)  Interoperability is:  applications can exchange data and services in a consistent and effective way  facing different hardware and software platforms ... .. a key success factor...  Some advantages:  saving of investments (cope with hw/sw evolution)  enlarging the market (compatibility with other vendors solutions)  Is a real quality issue  The key point: a consistent framework/technology

Oreste Signore- Quality/5 Amman, December 2006 Interoperability (semantic)  Web for Everyone: access to everyone, overcoming differences in culture, language, education, ability, material resources, and physical limitations of users on all continents  Consider "cultural barriers"  A message is:  Content: the true content of the message, the originator wants to communicate;  Structure: the way the information is organized (e.g. title, author, body, signature)  Presentation: the way the information is presented to the user (fonts, colours, page layout, etc.)  Semantic interoperability is a must

Oreste Signore- Quality/6 Amman, December 2006 Standards  A quality code conforms to Formal grammars defined for the Web  Conform to W3C Recommendations  Technologies defined by W3C Members (the whole technical Web community)

Oreste Signore- Quality/7 Amman, December 2006 Some standards  HTML  XML  XHTML  XSLT  WCAG  CSS  RDF  OWL  …

Oreste Signore- Quality/8 Amman, December 2006 Compatibility  “This site is best seen using …”  In the future, heavy site maintenance will be needed  New devices can access the Web  Old documents can be seen with new browsers  New documents can be seen with old browsers  Let us see some examples of different presentation of the same information (CSS)

Oreste Signore- Quality/9 Amman, December 2006 Restrictions?  NO!  Using web standards:  Doesn’t limit your imagination or creativity  Gives several important advantages Compatibility Lighter documents Adaptable documents Easier maintenance

Oreste Signore- Quality/10 Amman, December 2006 Separing content and presentation (1)

Oreste Signore- Quality/11 Amman, December 2006 Separing content and presentation (2)

Oreste Signore- Quality/12 Amman, December 2006 Separing content and presentation (3)

Oreste Signore- Quality/13 Amman, December 2006 Separing content and presentation (4)

Oreste Signore- Quality/14 Amman, December 2006 Separing content and presentation (5)

Oreste Signore- Quality/15 Amman, December 2006 Separing content and presentation (6)

Oreste Signore- Quality/16 Amman, December 2006 Information Integration  Standard vocabularies  definition difficult and time consuming  once defined, standards don't adapt well  people don't implement standards correctly anyway  Common schema  in principle the simplest way  different schemas, different cultural traditions  failure!  Metadata level  a typical example: Dublin CoreDublin Core  the number of metadata vocabularies will continue to grow (M. Doerr)  doubtful metadata vocabularies can exploit the full richness of possible associations

Oreste Signore- Quality/17 Amman, December 2006 Metadata vs ontology  A base for understanding  Core metadata  intended for integration  created, edited, viewed by humans  human factors play a primary role  Core ontology  underlying formal model for tools that integrate source data and perform a variety of extended functions  higher levels of complexity are tolerable  completeness and logical correctness are the driving forces  base for deriving knowledge

Oreste Signore- Quality/18 Amman, December 2006 What is an ontology?  An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation. A 'conceptualisation' refers to an abstract model of some phenomenon in the world by having identified the relevant concepts of that phenomenon. 'Explicit' means that the type of concepts used, and the constraints on their use are explicitly defined. For example, in medical domains, the concepts are diseases and symptoms, the relations between them are causal and a constraint is that a disease cannot cause itself. 'Formal' refers to the fact that the ontology should be machine readable, which excludes natural language. 'Shared' reflects the notion that an ontology captures consensual knowledge, that is, it is not private to some individual, but accepted by a group.

Oreste Signore- Quality/19 Amman, December 2006 Levels of knowledge representation  The degree of formalization of concepts and their relations varies considerably between various domains of knowledge  Lower end  lexicons and simple taxonomies (ordered classification system where terms are related hierarchically)  example: IconclassIconclass  Middle level  thesauri (controlled vocabularies that are structured to show relationships between terms and concepts, and, for example, allow for retrieving them from a database)  example: Art & Architecture Thesaurus ( AAT)AAT  High end  axiomatised logic theories, which include rules to ensure the well- formedness and logical validity of statements expressed in the language of the scientific discipline  example: CIDOC object-oriented Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM)CIDOC CRM

Oreste Signore- Quality/20 Amman, December 2006 The Semantic Web  A metadata based infrastructure for reasoning on the Web

Oreste Signore- Quality/21 Amman, December 2006 Semantic Web Technologies  RDF  basis for coding, exchanging and reusing structured metadata  allows interoperability among applications exchanging machine-understandable information on the web  OWL is a Web Ontologies Language to define:  the terminology used in a specific context  more constraints on properties  the logical characteristics of properties  the equivalence of terms across ontologies  etc.

Oreste Signore- Quality/22 Amman, December 2006 Thank you for your attention!  Questions?  References     Oreste Signore 