EU-CULTURA - CULTivating Understanding and Research through Adaptivity

A key challenge facing curators and providers of digital cultural heritage across Europe and Worldwide is to instigate, increase and enhance engagement with digital humanities collections. To achieve this, a fundamental change in the way cultural artefacts are experienced and contributed to by communities is required. CULTURA will pioneer the development of next generation adaptive systems which will provide new forms of multi-dimensional adaptation: personalised information retrieval and presentation which respond to models of user and contextual intent community-aware adaptation which responds to wider community activity, interest, contribution and experience content-aware adaptation which responds to the entities and relationships automatically identified within the artefacts and across collections personalised dynamic storylines which are generated across individual as well as entire collections of artefacts CULTURA advances and integrates the following key technologies: Cutting edge natural language processing, which normalises ambiguities in noisy historical texts Entity and relationship extraction, which highlights the key individuals, events, dates and other entities and relationships within unstructured text Social network analysis of the entities and relationships within the content, and also of the individuals and broader community of users engaging with the content Multi-model adaptation to support dynamic reconciliation of multiple dimensions of personalisation CULTURA will deliver innovative adaptive services and an interactive user environment which dynamically tailors the investigation, comprehension and enrichment of digital humanities artefacts and collections. Through the provision of such functionality, CULTURA can empower all users to investigate, comprehend and contribute to digital cultural collections. CULTURA will provide rigorous evaluation and validation of its adaptive services using high impact, contrasting, multicultural digital cultural heritage collections and diverse user communities and individuals.