3rd ITN-‐DCH Workshop in Nicosia, Cyprus 30th of November – 4th of December 2015 REPORT
ESR5: Georgia Stavropoulou
The 3rd ITN-‐DCH Workshop took place in the beginning of December 2015 and it was hosted by CUT in Nicosia, Cyprus. The title of the event was “Standardization – Archiving – Harvesting: Existing Cultural Heritage metadata interface and their relation to Semantic, Symbolic and Conceptual representations”, a succinct description of the subjects around which this event was revolved. Following the other successful ITN-‐DCH events, this workshop mainly tried to analyze the challenges of defining documentation standards and to offer training in the field of knowledge representation. The main focus of the week was the church of Asinou, one of the project’s case studies.
During the course of the workshop, a number of the interesting talks were given to the fellows and the other participants in order to bridge the gap between the specialists in metadata and those with no previous background. However, one of the most important aspects of the training was the hands-‐on experience in the church of Asinou. On the second day of the event, the fellows had the chance to revisit the monument and perform additional data collection. Additionally, Prof.
Andreas Nicolaides gave a talk in the church and presented many different aspects of the wider environment of the monument, regarding its frescoes, history and architecture. His talk triggered many discussions between the participants over the methodologies and pipelines that should be followed for a holistic documentation of Asinou.
Personally, I believe the highlight of the workshop was the educational board game created by two of the project fellows, George Bruseker (ER1) and Anaïs Guillem (ESR6). The board game consisted of 2 handmade card decks with images of objects that are related to the wider cultural environment of the Asinou monument. One deck represented different entity types and the other represented different relationships (properties). The fellows, after being divided in two groups, tried to build knowledge organization schemas with the given cards. The process was very entertaining and, at the same time, we were all effectively trained to understand the basic concepts and terminology behind the CIDOC-‐CRM.
To conclude, I believe this workshop offered significant training to the project’s fellows in the domain of ontologies and semantics. Personally, I left Cyprus with a better understanding of what semantic representation means and how all information could be mapped in a common semantic framework. More importantly, this workshop was successful in highlighting the importance of establishing specific documentation standards in the field of cultural heritage.
