The number of digital images that are available online today has reached unprecedented levels. Recent statistics showed that by the end of 2013 there were over 250 billion photographs stored in just one of the major social media sites, with a daily average upload of 300 million photos. These photos, apart from documenting personal lives, often relate to experiences in well-known places of cultural interest, throughout several periods of time. Thus from the viewpoint of Cultural Heritage professionals, they constitute valuable and freely available digital cultural content. Advances in the fields of Photogrammetry and Computer Vision have led to significant breakthroughs such as the Structure from Motion algorithm which creates 3D models of objects using their 2D photographs. The existence of powerful and affordable computational machinery enables the reconstruction not only of single structures such as artefacts, but also of entire cities. This paper presents an overview of our methodology for producing cost-effective 4D – i.e. in space and time – models of Cultural Heritage structures such as monuments and artefacts from 2D data (pictures, video) and semantic information, freely available ‘in the wild’, i.e. in Internet repositories and social media. State-of-the-art methods from Computer Vision, Photogrammetry, 3D Reconstruction and Semantic representation are incorporated in an innovative workflow with the main goal to enable historians, architects, archaeologists, urban planners and other cultural heritage professionals to reconstruct cost-effective views of historical structures out of the billions of free images floating around the web and subsequently interact with those reconstructions.

One of the main characteristics of the Internet era we are living in, is the free and online availability of a huge amount of data. This data is of varied reliability and accuracy and exists in various forms and formats. Often, it is cross-referenced and linked to other data, forming a nexus of text, images, animation and audio enabled by hypertext and, recently, by the Web3.0 standard. Our main goal is to enable historians, architects, archaeologists, urban planners and affiliated professionals to reconstruct views of historical monuments from thousands of images floating around the web. This paper aims to provide an update of our progress in designing and implementing a pipeline for searching, filtering and retrieving photographs from Open Access Image Repositories and social media sites and using these images to build accurate 3D models of archaeological monuments as well as enriching multimedia of cultural / archaeological interest with metadata and harvesting the end products to EU-ROPEANA. We provide details of how our implemented software searches and retrieves images of archaeological sites from Flickr and Picasa repositories as well as strategies on how to filter the results, on two levels; a) based on their built-in metadata including geo-location information and b) based on image processing and clustering techniques. We also describe our implementation of a Structure from Motion pipeline designed for producing 3D models using the large collection of 2D input images (>1000) retrieved from Internet Repositories.

Innovation is a critical factor in building an organization’s culture of growth. Provided that it is properly blended with organizational development initiatives and aligned with the organization’s strategy, it supplies a compelling advantage for the growth process. Neglecting to encompass innovation in an organization’s culture could lead to shrinkage and even extinction, in the case of an intensively competitive market. Executive staff must consider innovative technologies and be aware of all growth opportunities. However, this staff is stressed under information overload. A need exists to reduce the information load and filter available technologies according to the specific needs of the organization. In this paper, the authors propose a recommendation approach to match the needs of an organization against existing technologies (innovative products or services). The organization expresses its customized needs by declaring its preferences over a small reference set of indicative technologies. Each technology is characterized by multiple attributes, in a way that the organization ultimately expresses the trade-offs between the attributes’ significance weights. This information is used to create the organization’s profile. The profile guides a recommendation process, according to which available technologies are evaluated against the profile and proposed to the organization in a descending order.

E-learning has known a large expansion in the past decades due to the advent of the Internet as a major communication medium and the WWW as a technology that provides enormous capabilities for information exchange anytime, anywhere, anyhow. Few studies exist on the evaluation of e-learning Websites in terms of their pedagogical quality that is on their success in helping learners learn through specific pedagogical principles. Pedagogical evaluation, however, is very important in e-learning as it can improve the quality of the system greatly and help the decision maker choose the most appropriate among different systems or designs. This chapter proposes a multi-criteria evaluation model for e-learning Websites based on well-known pedagogical principles, namely Bloom’s taxonomy of six cognitive objectives, Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.

No abstract