Hydria: An Online Data Lake for Multi-Faceted Analytics in the Cultural Heritage Domain

Abstract

Advancements in cultural informatics have significantly influenced the way we perceive, analyze, communicate and understand culture. New data sources, such as social media, digitized cultural content, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, have allowed us to enrich and customize the cultural experience, but at the same time have created an avalanche of new data that needs to be stored and appropriately managed in order to be of value. Although data management plays a central role in driving forward the cultural heritage domain, the solutions applied so far are fragmented, physically distributed, require specialized IT knowledge to deploy, and entail significant IT experience to operate even for trivial tasks. In this work, we present Hydria, an online data lake that allows users without any IT background to harvest, store, organize, analyze and share heterogeneous, multi-faceted cultural heritage data. Hydria provides a zero-administration, zero-cost, integrated framework that enables researchers, museum curators and other stakeholders within the cultural heritage domain to easily (i) deploy data acquisition services (like social media scrapers, focused web crawlers, dataset imports, questionnaire forms), (ii) design and manage versatile customizable data stores, (iii) share whole datasets or horizontal/vertical data shards with other stakeholders, (iv) search, filter and analyze data via an expressive yet simple-to-use graphical query engine and visualization tools, and (v) perform user management and access control operations on the stored data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution in the literature that focuses on collecting, managing, analyzing, and sharing diverse, multi-faceted data in the cultural heritage domain and targets users without an IT background.

Advanced systems and technologies for the enhancement of user experience in cultural spaces: an overview

“…As highlighted by Deligiannis et al [79], current technological devices and, consequently, innovative digital content enable the enrichment of the cultural experience leading to the generation of data that needs to be well managed to become "value". Data management itself is a focal point for the advancement of the entire cultural heritage field.…”

Digital Technologies and the Role of Data in Cultural Heritage: The Past, the Present, and the Future

“…Specifically, the authors analyse the Transmission of the Feminist Intangible Cultural Heritage on Twitter. The perspective of multi-faceted analytics in the cultural heritage domain is researched in [105]. The authors present a data lake that offers both fundamental and advanced user and data/knowledge management functionality for big cultural data management.…”

CEBA: A Data Lake for Data Sharing and Environmental Monitoring

“…As Deligiannis et al explain in [ 6 ], many stakeholders are lacking the resources for infrastructure and/or computing expertise, and still rely on outdated approaches such as (i) storing their data in spreadsheets or raw files, (ii) sharing their data with colleagues through email, cloud uploads of zip files, or even by snail mailing electronic copies in removable media, and (iii) analyzing the data via sub-standard tools and trial software. They also mentioned that the proposed data storage solutions usually require significant computing infrastructure and need the constant support and active involvement of Information Technology (IT) experts even for trivial tasks such as incorporating new data.…”