Antoine Isaac Europeana – VU University Amsterdam Dagstuhl Multilingual Semantic Web seminar

Europeana  24 M objects (images, text, sound and video)  From over libraries, museums, archives  From 33 countries  For everyone “A digital library that is a single, direct and multilingual access point to the European cultural heritage.” European Parliament

Multilingual Access in Europeana

Dimensions of multilingual access  Interface  Search (q uery translation or document translation)  Result presentation  Browsing

Europeana's efforts  Interface translated into 26 languages  Query translation: only prototype  Query result filtering by country/language  Document translation (user enabled)  Semantic contextualization of objects Multilingual enrichment/annotation of metadata

Making metadata work for multilingual access

Current metadata in Europeana  Simple object records  Flat (text values)  Without language tags!  Only language-related info on metadata is at collection level Can be "mul" Need to change!  a new Europeana Data Model (EDM)

"Semantic layer" of contextual resources (concepts, persons, places, events...) Networked objects Cultural artefact Painting Sculpture Buildling Exploiting semantic relations e.g. “broader concept”, “place of birth”, “involved person”…

Multilingual metadata

Fetching already available linked data E.g., from libraries

Interoperability  Encouraging the use of RDF + common and simple elements

Interoperability  Encouraging the use of common and simple data elements Piano carré Pianoforte a tavolino Square pianoforte Tafelklavier Tafelpiano Taffel Pianofortes

Interoperability  mixed nature of eligible contextual resources: dictionaries, synonym/translation lists, thesauri, authority lists, gazetteers…  interplay: “semantic” data next to multilingual data

Simultaneous approaches  Getting richer semantic/multilingual metadata from providers  Fetching third-party contextual data and linking it to “un- contextualized” objects  Linking contextual data from an institution to another more general / more commonly used contextual dataset Dbpedia.org, VIAF.org …

Status and challenges

Current status  All this is work in progress and will take time R&D prototypes (EuropeanaConnect) showing the challenges of gathering appropriate multilingual tools and dataEuropeanaConnect  First tests of simple techniques in production portal: GeoNames (places) and GEMET (concepts) GeoNamesGEMET Encouraging, but illustrate issues with too naïve approaches (no NLP) and incomplete data Cheval Poison

Problems & requirements For providers & Europeana  Continue work on metadata  Benchmarking (cf. CHiC CLEF)CHiC lab  Positioning as consumers and contributors of data (cf Asun’s slides) data.europeana.eu For language-intensive tools and resources  Availability: open resources  Interoperability  Simplicity But not always! E.g., not only “first hit” translations  Scale: scalability of tools, number and scope of datasets  Many languages, some lesser-resourced (wrt. English)

Another illustration: VOICES project S o m e t h i n g e n t i r e l y d i f f e r e n t b u t n o t c o m p l e t e l y u n r e l a t e dVOICES Voice-based community-centric mobile services for social development  Easing communication on agricultural trade  Listing of products/prices via phone/radio  Pilot in Mali Challenges  Data-centric project, but language technology plays a crucial role  Objects should be provided with textual and audio labels (text-to- speech system) in different languages  Local languages: e.g., Bambara  Lack of resource: need low-cost, easy-to-adapt solutions Victor de Boer, VU Amsterdam

Thank you Some slides based on Marlies Olensky and Juliane Stiller - Multilingual Web Workshop, June 11, 2012, Dublin