CrowdHeritage: Crowdsourcing for Improving the Quality of Cultural Heritage Metadata

Abstract

The lack of granular and rich descriptive metadata highly affects the discoverability and usability of cultural heritage collections aggregated and served through digital platforms, such as Europeana, thus compromising the user experience. In this context, metadata enrichment services through automated analysis and feature extraction along with crowdsourcing annotation services can offer a great opportunity for improving the metadata quality of digital cultural content in a scalable way, while at the same time engaging different user communities and raising awareness about cultural heritage assets. To address this need, we propose the CrowdHeritage open end-to-end enrichment and crowdsourcing ecosystem, which supports an end-to-end workflow for the improvement of cultural heritage metadata by employing crowdsourcing and by combining machine and human intelligence to serve the particular requirements of the cultural heritage domain. The proposed solution repurposes, extends, and combines in an innovative way general-purpose state-of-the-art AI tools, semantic technologies, and aggregation mechanisms with a novel crowdsourcing platform, so as to support seamless enrichment workflows for improving the quality of CH metadata in a scalable, cost-effective, and amusing way.

Imagens do patrimônio cultural como objetos digitais na perspectiva da polirrepresentação: análise do Europeana Image Classification Pilot

“…Conhecido pela ideia do "poder da multidão", o processo de crowdsourcing tem como objetivo aproveitar a inteligência de um grande grupo heterogêneo de pessoas para resolver questões (Kaldeli et al, 2021). Configura-se, portanto, como uma atividade participativa que costuma ocorrer em plataformas interativas em-linha com foco na colaboração em rede.…”

A Crowdsourcing Recommendation Model for Image Annotations in Cultural Heritage Platforms

“…gameplay put a focus on responsiveness and accuracy, implicitly assuming that tags are genuine if there is widespread agreement among players; but still, the community itself acts as the filter, with no technological or interaction support to correct or improve the information quality. Furthermore, the European Union recently launched the CrowdHeritage platform, an online crowdsourcing platform for enriching the metadata of digitized cultural heritage material available on the Europeana portal [50]. The website of this project allows users to leave comments on selected cultural archives or authenticate existing ones in the same basic way that people browse all existing catalogues with no customization provided.…”

Novel Ways of Discovering, Capturing and Experiencing Cultural Heritage: A Review of Current State-of-the-Art, Challenges and Future Directions

“…Nonetheless, challenges to aggregation continue to persist, referring to issues that range from the lack of granular and rich descriptive metadata [32], to technical interoperability and copyright [33,34].…”

“…The need to improve the quality of cultural heritage metadata and collection management systems (CMSs) is stressed [35]. Metadata enrichment through crowdsourcing annotation services [32] and machine learning techniques [36][37][38][39] is recommended.…”