OKFest Hackday Results

During the OKFestival, we organised together with the open science stream a hackday where programmers, developers, designers, artists and data owners came together to unlock the potential of the openly licensed cultural data of Finland. There was a wide variety of tools and datasets where the participants could work on and it was great to see the results people were able to produce in this one day event.

After a series of lightning talks where different dataproviders presented their API’s, content, and ideas, five groups were formed.

##Open cultural heritage

In the open cultural heritage group, there were loads of data available. Representatives from the Finnish National Library, the Central Art Archive and the Kallio Archive all brought datasets and API’s to be used. And then there was Europeana who had just released the data of more than 20 million cultural objects from their collection. After some thoughts, it was decided to visualize the location of the different art works on a map. For this project, the city of Helsinki was selected and ArtMap was created. The basic functionality gives the user the opportunity to quickly see where artworks with specific qualities, such as author, or time-period, can be found in Helsinki.
The team went one step further and used the fact that all of Europeana’s data is now available as Linked Open Data. This means that users of ArtMap can semantically continue their search. In practice this means that a user finds for example Leonardo da Vinci, who was born in a small village and then moved to Florence, to die in Amboise. The linked data makes it easy to look for other artists from that same period in that same city. By just clicking on the city, other related objects appear and can be found by the user, or be visualized on ArtMap, so people can see where to find these objects.

Developer Marco Montanari has created a small slidedeck about the application which is embedded here. All the code of ArtMap can be found on GitHub

##Wikimedia Edit-aThon

The Finnish Wikimedia chapter organised an edit-a-thon during the hackday. Together with representatives from Finnish cultural institutions they edited several pages about these institutions or artworks they own. Tommi Kovala who is a board member of Wikimedia Finland started with creating a timeline out of the Wikipedia article about the evolution of mobile phones. Together with the Rupriikki media museum who owns the actual mobile phones, it was agreed they would make pictures of the phones where the size is relatively correct, so one can see how much smaller phones have become over the years. For more info about the work of Wikimedia Finland and the visualisation see their Wiki

##Digital Humanities

A team of the Italian software company Net7 was present at OKfest to experiment with the Pundit platform they are developing for the Digitised Manuscrips to Europeana project (DM2E), which allows scholars to semantically annotate text. In advance, they had set up a dedicated OKFest page where they kept track of their activities. First off the team created an add-on to Pundit that allowed for the visualisation of annotations using the Edgemaps visualisation engine.

Second the team integrated the new Europeana Linked Data API with Pundit, allowing users to easily refer to one or more of the 20 million metdata records now made available under a the Creative Commons public domain dedication waiver.

For a complete report see the blog post on the DM2E website

##Open Video

A large team of video editors came together to create new works with openly licensed cultural material such as the Kallio Archive, Europeana and the Rijksmuseum. The session explored how the video medium and audiovisual archival content can be used as a rich resource for creative activities. By combining several sources that were freely available for reuse, several new great works were created. All video results are being documented on the AvoinGLAM blog.

##Open Science

Besides all the activities related to open cultural data, there was a big team from the OKFN’s Open Science working group who worked on several projects. They have blogged extensively about their experiences, which can be found here