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Despite extensive research having been conducted on the subject, the problem of three-dimensional information systems for historical cities is actually still unresolved. In addition, commercially available software seems to be increasingly aiming at a quick development of unspecific urban settings, rather than at a metrically and perceptively faithful representation of reality. In this scenario, the SIUR 3D software (Sistema Informativo URbano tridimensionale) is based on a management structure that links an interactive, photorealistic and metrically reliable model of a city with a qualitative database of the historical, archaeological and material scope of an architectural part. Such application uses the Unity 3D game engine for geometrical models management and is equipped for online data sharing.

Despite the hype, the effective implementation of Open Science is hindered by several cultural and technical barriers. Researchers embraced digital science, use “digital laboratories” (e.g. research infrastructures, thematic services) to conduct their research and publish research data, but practices and tools are still far from achieving the expectations of transparency and reproducibility of Open Science. The places where science is performed and the places where science is published are still regarded as different realms. Publishing is still a post-experimental, tedious, manual process, too often limited to articles, in some contexts semantically linked to datasets, rarely to software, generally disregarding digital representations of experiments. In this work we present the OpenAIRE Research Community Dashboard (RCD), designed to overcome some of these barriers for a given research community, minimizing the technical efforts and without renouncing any of the community services or practices. The RCD flanks digital laboratories of research communities with scholarly communication tools for discovering and publishing interlinked scientific products such as literature, datasets, and software. The benefits of the RCD are show-cased by means of two real-case scenarios: the European Marine Science community and the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) research infrastructure. This work is partly funded by the OpenAIRE-Advance H2020 project (grant number: 777541; call: H2020-EINFRA-2017) and the OpenAIREConnect H2020 project (grant number: 731011; call: H2020-EINFRA-2016-1). Moreover, we would like to thank our colleagues Michele Manunta, Francesco Casu, and Claudio De Luca (Institute for the Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment, CNR, Italy) for their work on the EPOS infrastructure RCD; and Stephane Pesant (University of Bremen, Germany) his work on the European Marine Science RCD. First Online 30 August 2019

In 2018, the European Strategic Forum for research infrastructures (ESFRI) was tasked by the Competitiveness Council, a configuration of the Council of the EU, to develop a common approach for monitoring of Research Infrastructures' performance. To this end, ESFRI established a working group, which has proposed 21 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor the progress of the Research Infrastructures (RIs) addressed towards their objectives. The RIs were then asked to assess their relevance for their institution. The paper aims to identify the relevance of certain indicators for particular groups of RIs by using cluster and discriminant analysis. This could contribute to development of a monitoring system, tailored to particular RIs. To obtain a typology of the RIs, we first performed cluster analysis of the RIs according to their properties, which revealed clusters of RIs with similar characteristics, based on to the domain of operation, such as food, environment or engineering. Then, discriminant analysis was used to study how the relevance of the KPIs differs among the obtained clusters. This analysis revealed that the percentage of RIs correctly classified into five clusters, using the KPIs, is 80%. Such a high percentage indicates that there are significant differences in the relevance of certain indicators, depending on the ESFRI domain of the RI. The indicators therefore need to be adapted to the type of infrastructure. It is therefore proposed that the Strategic Working Groups of ESFRI addressing specific domains should be involved in the tailored development of the monitoring of pan-European RIs. Comment: 15 pages, 8 tables, 3 figures

International audience; In this paper, we present an online communication-driven decision support system to align terms from a dataset with terms of another dataset (standardized controlled vocabulary or not). Heterotoki differs from existing proposals in that it takes place at the interface with humans, inviting the experts to commit on their definitions, so as to either agree to validate the mapping or to propose some enrichment to the terminologies. More precisely, differently to most of existing proposals that support terminology alignment, Heterotoki sustains the negotiation of meaning thanks to semantic coordination support within its interface design. This negotiation involves domain experts having produced multiple datasets.

Over the last decade Digital Humanities has ceased being a “niche discipline” and have become a major phenomenon in academic and cultural debate. Significant scientific results and outcomes have been achieved, and fundamental research infrastructures have been realized. Despite these far-reaching outcomes, Digital Humanities still does not have a satisfactory influence in the traditional disciplinary fields. We need to find new methods to deal with cultural artifacts and texts. Amongst the many emerging research fields in the DH, two come forth as the most promising and interesting: Big Data and distant reading; Semantic Web and Linked Open Data. In my paper I will argue that Big Data in the Humanities, although very promising, have some critical issues, and I will propose the idea of a Semantic Cultural and Literary Web, a collaborative infrastructure based on ontology driven semantic annotation of primary resources.  Over the last decade Digital Humanities has ceased being a “niche discipline” and have become a major phenomenon in academic and cultural debate. Significant scientific results and outcomes have been achieved, and fundamental research infrastructures have been realized. Despite these far-reaching outcomes, Digital Humanities still does not have a satisfactory influence in the traditional disciplinary fields. We need to find new methods to deal with cultural artifacts and texts. Amongst the many emerging research fields in the DH, two come forth as the most promising and interesting: Big Data and distant reading; Semantic Web and Linked Open Data. In my paper I will argue that Big Data in the Humanities, although very promising, have some critical issues, and I will propose the idea of a Semantic Cultural and Literary Web, a collaborative infrastructure based on ontology driven semantic annotation of primary resources.

The paper introduces into a new Science Gateway, developed in the framework of the European Horizon 2020 project EGI Engage - DARIAH Competence Centre, which started in March 2015 co-funded by the European Union, with the participation of about 70 (research) units in over 30 countries. In this paper the authors focus on trans-disciplinary collaboration in the framework of explorative lexicography in cultural context. On the one hand, they give a short overview of the architecture of the Science Gateway, used techniques, and specific applications and services developed during the DARIAH Competence Centre. On the other they mainly focus on possible added value and changes concerning work flow for Lexicographers and researchers on Lexical resources. This is exemplified on the European network of COST action IS 1305 “European Network of electronic lexicography (ENeL)”.

Digital archives of memory institutions are typically concerned with the cataloguing of artefacts of artistic, historical, and cultural value. Recently, new forms of citizen participation in cultural heritage have emerged, producing a wealth of material spanning from visitors' experiential feedback on exhibitions and cultural artefacts, to digitally mediated interactions like the ones happening on social media platforms. Citizen curation is proposed in the context of the European project SPICE - Social Participation, Cohesion, and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement - as a methodology for producing, collecting, interpreting, and archiving people's responses to cultural objects, with the aim of favouring the emergence of multiple, sometimes conflicting viewpoints, and motivating users and memory institutions to reflect upon them. We argue that citizen curation urges to rethink the nature of computational infrastructures supporting data management of memory institutions, bringing novel challenges that include issues of distribution, authoritativeness, interdependence, privacy, and rights management. To approach these issues, we survey relevant literature towards a distributed, Linked Data infrastructure, with a focus on identifying the roles and requirements involved in such an infrastructure. We show how existing research can contribute significantly in facing the challenges raised by citizen curation, and discuss challenges and opportunities from the socio-technical standpoint.

This paper describes the achievements of the H2020 project INDIGO-DataCloud. The project has provided e-infrastructures with tools, applications and cloud framework enhancements to manage the demanding requirements of scientific communities, either locally or through enhanced interfaces. The middleware developed allows to federate hybrid resources, to easily write, port and run scientific applications to the cloud. In particular, we have extended existing PaaS (Platform as a Service) solutions, allowing public and private e-infrastructures, including those provided by EGI, EUDAT, and Helix Nebula, to integrate their existing services and make them available through AAI services compliant with GEANT interfederation policies, thus guaranteeing transparency and trust in the provisioning of such services. Our middleware facilitates the execution of applications using containers on Cloud and Grid based infrastructures, as well as on HPC clusters. Our developments are freely downloadable as open source components, and are already being integrated into many scientific applications. Comment: 39 pages, 15 figures.Version accepted in Journal of Grid Computing

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.

In the framework of the H2020 INDIGO-DataCloud project, we have implemented an advanced solution for the automatic deployment of digital data repositories based on Invenio, the digital library framework developed by CERN. Exploiting cutting-edge technologies, such as Docker and Apache Mesos, and standard specifications to describe application architectures such as TOSCA, we are able to provide a service that simplifies the process of creating and managing repositories of various digital assets using cloud resources. An Invenio-based repository consists of a set of services (e.g. database, message queue, cache, workers and frontend) that need to be properly installed, configured and linked together. These operations, along with the provisioning of the resources and their monitoring and maintenance, can be challenging for individual researchers or small-to-moderate-sized research groups. To this purpose, the INDIGO-DataCloud platform provides advanced features for orchestrating the deployment of complex virtual infrastructures on distributed cloud environments: it is able to provision the required resources automatically over heterogeneous and/or hybrid cloud infrastructures and to configure them automatically ensuring dynamic elasticity and resilience. This approach has been successfully adapted to support the needs of the researchers and scholars in the domain of the Digital Arts and Humanities.