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The interdisciplinary EU funded project INCEPTION – Inclusive Cultural Heritage in Europe through 3D semantic modelling, coordinated by the Department of Architecture of the University of Ferrara, is focused on bringing together innovative 3D modelling and ICT applications and professionals involved in different fields of Cultural Heritage. The aim is to increase knowledge, enhancement and dissemination through 3D digital models in order to promote the inclusiveness and accessibility of European assets. In this direction, a Stakeholder Panel with different skills in the field of Cultural Heritage has been involved leading the research toward effective strategies to increase use and reuse of digital models. These strategies are aimed at maximizing the impact of using digital data for cultural heritage applications involving a wide range of non-expert and expert users, starting from specific requirements for processing, managing, delivering cultural heritage information to a broad audience. A co-design workshop has been organized involving Stakeholders in order to investigate on their requirements and expectations, to obtain information that could be useful for the User Centered process of definition of INCEPTION’s main outcomes and functionalities.

Here we address the roadmap of the Digital Cultural Heritage research group DigitCH group, which was set up in 2013 at the Department of Architecture, University of Florence. The aim of DigitCH group was to realize the link between scientifically validated methodologies and contents, innovative storytelling, and technological instrumentation. The spread of electronic devices has enabled rapid and easy technological fallout of research in the field of the acquisition-representation of the survey data expanding audiences and accelerating even an innovative approach to the whole knowledge of CH.

International audience; This paper presents an attempt to provide a generic named-entity recognition and disambiguation module (NERD) called entity-fishing as a stable online service that demonstrates the possible delivery of sustainable technical services within DARIAH, the European digital research infrastructure for the arts and humanities. Deployed as part of the national infrastructure Huma-Num in France, this service provides an efficient state-of-the-art implementation coupled with standardised interfaces allowing an easy deployment on a variety of potential digital humanities contexts. The topics of accessibility and sustainability have been long discussed in the attempt of providing some best practices in the widely fragmented ecosystem of the DARIAH research infrastructure. The history of entity-fishing has been mentioned as an example of good practice: initially developed in the context of the FP9 CENDARI, the project was well received by the user community and continued to be further developed within the H2020 HIRMEOS project where several open access publishers have integrated the service to their collections of published monographs as a means to enhance retrieval and access.entity-fishing implements entity extraction as well as disambiguation against Wikipedia and Wikidata entries. The service is accessible through a REST API which allows easier and seamless integration, language independent and stable convention and a widely used service oriented architecture (SOA) design. Input and output data are carried out over a query data model with a defined structure providing flexibility to support the processing of partially annotated text or the repartition of text over several queries. The interface implements a variety of functionalities, like language recognition, sentence segmentation and modules for accessing and looking up concepts in the knowledge base. The API itself integrates more advanced contextual parametrisation or ranked outputs, allowing for the resilient integration in various possible use cases. The entity-fishing API has been used as a concrete use case3 to draft the experimental stand-off proposal, which has been submitted for integration into the TEI guidelines. The representation is also compliant with the Web Annotation Data Model (WADM).In this paper we aim at describing the functionalities of the service as a reference contribution to the subject of web-based NERD services. In order to cover all aspects, the architecture is structured to provide two complementary viewpoints. First, we discuss the system from the data angle, detailing the workflow from input to output and unpacking each building box in the processing flow. Secondly, with a more academic approach, we provide a transversal schema of the different components taking into account non-functional requirements in order to facilitate the discovery of bottlenecks, hotspots and weaknesses. The attempt here is to give a description of the tool and, at the same time, a technical software engineering analysis which will help the reader to understand our choice for the resources allocated in the infrastructure.Thanks to the work of million of volunteers, Wikipedia has reached today stability and completeness that leave no usable alternatives on the market (considering also the licence aspect). The launch of Wikidata in 2010 have completed the picture with a complementary language independent meta-model which is becoming the scientific reference for many disciplines. After providing an introduction to Wikipedia and Wikidata, we describe the knowledge base: the data organisation, the entity-fishing process to exploit it and the way it is built from nightly dumps using an offline process.We conclude the paper by presenting our solution for the service deployment: how and which the resources where allocated. The service has been in production since Q3 of 2017, and extensively used by the H2020 HIRMEOS partners during the integration with the publishing platforms. We believe we have strived to provide the best performances with the minimum amount of resources. Thanks to the Huma-num infrastructure we still have the possibility to scale up the infrastructure as needed, for example to support an increase of demand or temporary needs to process huge backlog of documents. On the long term, thanks to this sustainable environment, we are planning to keep delivering the service far beyond the end of the H2020 HIRMEOS project.

Abstract. Cultural heritage is a complex and diverse concept, which brings together a wide domain of information. Resources linked to a cultural heritage site may consist of physical artefacts, books, works of art, pictures, historical maps, aerial photographs, archaeological surveys and 3D models. Moreover, all these resources are listed and described by a set of a variety of metadata specifications that allow their online search and consultation on the most basic characteristics of them. Some examples include Norma ISO 19115, Dublin Core, AAT, CDWA, CCO, DACS, MARC, MoReq, MODS, MuseumDat, TGN, SPECTRUM, VRA Core and Z39.50. Gateways are in place to fit in these metadata standards into those used in a SDI (ISO 19115 or INSPIRE), but substantial work still remains to be done for the complete incorporation of cultural heritage information. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the complexity of cultural heritage resources can be dealt with by a visual exploration of their metadata within a 3D collaborative environment. The 3D collaborative environments are promising tools that represent the new frontier of our capacity of learning, understanding, communicating and transmitting culture.