Seifert Christin, Bailer Werner, Orgel Thomas, Gantner Louis, Kern Roman, Ziak Hermann, Petit Albin, Schlötterer Jörg, Zwicklbauer Stefan, Granitzer Michael
2017
The digitization initiatives in the past decades have led to a tremendous increase in digitized objects in the cultural heritagedomain. Although digitally available, these objects are often not easily accessible for interested users because of the distributedallocation of the content in different repositories and the variety in data structure and standards. When users search for culturalcontent, they first need to identify the specific repository and then need to know how to search within this platform (e.g., usageof specific vocabulary). The goal of the EEXCESS project is to design and implement an infrastructure that enables ubiquitousaccess to digital cultural heritage content. Cultural content should be made available in the channels that users habituallyvisit and be tailored to their current context without the need to manually search multiple portals or content repositories. Torealize this goal, open-source software components and services have been developed that can either be used as an integratedinfrastructure or as modular components suitable to be integrated in other products and services. The EEXCESS modules andcomponents comprise (i) Web-based context detection, (ii) information retrieval-based, federated content aggregation, (iii) meta-data definition and mapping, and (iv) a component responsible for privacy preservation. Various applications have been realizedbased on these components that bring cultural content to the user in content consumption and content creation scenarios. Forexample, content consumption is realized by a browser extension generating automatic search queries from the current pagecontext and the focus paragraph and presenting related results aggregated from different data providers. A Google Docs add-onallows retrieval of relevant content aggregated from multiple data providers while collaboratively writing a document. Theserelevant resources then can be included in the current document either as citation, an image, or a link (with preview) withouthaving to leave disrupt the current writing task for an explicit search in various content providers’ portals.