7th ODS Coordination and 6th Cluster Meetings

This week, the 7th ODS Coordination and 6th Cluster Meetings of the Open Discovery Space project are taking place in Helsinki, Finland. University of Helsinki is hosting the event, which started on Tuesday morning with the cluster II meeting sessions. Regading our group, the morning sessions of cluster II are the most relevant ones, as the Content data alignment is being discussed: Enayat has been presenting the updated results on the harvested, pending and new repositories, we have also presented together with Paul Libretch the current status of the search engine as well as the pending tasks. A later session of our interest lead by Open University of the Netherlands discussed the status and future work in the social information to be exposed and managed in the ODS portal, among other issues such as the social info-powered recommender engine.

Tomorrow sessions for cluster III are of special interest to us too, as we will present the work we did creating and giving the content providers online seminars as well as preparing a MOOC for anyone interested in joining ODS project as content provider. David Martin will be the IE representative in those sessions. Bellow, some pictures taken during these days.

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3rd ECVET-Step meeting in Alcala

The 3rd ECVET-Step meeting took place in our hometown Alcala de Henares, from 1st to 3rd December. The meeting was held at a crucial moment during the project lifetime, i.e. just before the end of year 1, so a lot of important discussions took place, many reports on the work done during the first part of our project were done and also a few critical discussions run, specially for the University of Alcala, on the shape and features that the project online services and portal will provide. IE members Enayat, Meritxell and Salvador participated in the sessions.

We presented to our partners the revised version of D2.1 (a report presenting the review of existing information models and metadata implementations in systems that exchange, process, use and combine various competence-related information objects in VET), and also started to prepare the documentation for the soon to come interim report. It was also time to complete our report to IAEI concerning dissemination events, as well as to provide feedback for the exploitation activities and to the quality and risk questionnaires by UDE. On the social side, we had a nice dinner in the surprising tapas restaurant Plademunt (the imaginary restaurant) with lots of funny conversation and laughs to develop the teamwork spirit 🙂

6TH ODS meeting in Belgrade

During the last 3 days Belgrade, the capital and largest city of Serbia, hosted the 6th ODS coordination and 5th cluster meetings. The overall objectives were of course, to present the progress of the work so far, but also to ensure partner responsibilities, activities and tasks outputs are aligned and to agree on a detailed plan for 3rd period of the project.

A six months extension to the project was announced as a surprise to many of us, particularly to University of Alcala participants Maricruz, David, Enayat and Salvador, who were attending the sessions in a non-particularly populated room. Another important news was the presentation of the new project manager and assistant to the coordinator, Mr. Evangelos Argyzoudis. The Metropolitan University facilities, facing the Danube, were something to remember (see pictures below). As usual, the atmosphere was OK and we all had a great time biking on the Danube riverside.

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2nd ECVET-Step meeting at Ede, Netherlands

During the last 3 days (2nd to 4th of July), the second meeting of the partners of the ECVET Step consortium has been successfully held in Ede, the Netherlands. The meeting, nicely hosted by AOC Raad, was a nice opportunity to discuss the status of current activities such as the consultation meetings and to clarify the concepts and objectives of some incipient tasks. As usual, a homework list was prepared for all to know exactly what is expected from them for the next 6 months. As or us, IE member Salvador visited Ede and gathered all the necessary information. It was really nice to meet all friends like Jad and Tasos, as well as the ones we are working with for the first time in this project such as Petr, Hans and Ales (among others!).

All delegates but Salvador 😦

Social dinner

Salvador riding Hans’ bike

SemaGrow 3rd project meeting in Wageningen

The 3rd plenary meeting of European Project SemaGrow took place in Wageningen (The Netherlands) on 12th and 13rd of May 2014. Alberto Nogales researcher of IERU group assisted representing Alcalá University. Organized by partnert DLO (Stichting Dienst Landbouwkundig Onderzoek), the meeting took place at Alterra premises in the Wageningen University campus. The meeting started with a brain storming about how to cover the improvements noted by the reviewers after the first project review on January 2014. Then progresses in SemaGrow architecture and Ontology Evolutionwere were presented by NCSR-D and UNITOV respectively.

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Finally the Piloting Plan and Deployment where discussed by all the consortium in order to face the next period until the 4th plenary meeting to be organized in Athens during October 2014. We keep on researching.

ODS project meeting in Bayreuth

The 4th cluster and 5th coordination ODS meeting was held in Bayreuth, Germany last week, from Wednesday to Friday. IE members David and Enayat participated in the meeting. In the second day (Cluster II meeting), Enayat (and Kostas from GRnet) presented the work done in the past months regarding the ODS harvesting and its metadata analysis in WP7. They also discussed several issues, ideas and plans that ODS faces in the forthcoming harvesting round.

ODS partners also exchanged their ideas about some tasks which should have to be prepared for the review meeting in June.

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Bayreuth is a sizeable town in northern Bavaria, Germany, on the Red Main river. The town’s roots date back to 1194 and it is nowadays the capital of Upper Franconia with a population of 71,482. It is world-famous for its annual Bayreuth Festival, at which performances of operas by the 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner are presented. Above, some snapshots taken during these 3 days.

Nikos Palavitsinis PhD dissertation

Last Friday, 21st of February, IE doctorate student and AgroKnow member Nikos Palavitsinis successfully presented his thesis METADATA QUALITY ISSUES IN LEARNING REPOSITORIES. The formal defense of the dissertation took place in the ancient Colegio de San Ildefonso of the University of Alcala, a beautiful baroque building currently hosting the Rectorate.

Nikos research work, supervised by IE member Salvador Sanchez and Dr. Nikos Manouselis, aimed to propose a set of methods that can be deployed throughout the life cycle of a repository to ensure that metadata generated from content providers are of high quality. The theoretical model (named MQACP for short) was applied on a Learning Federation of repositories, from day 1 of its existence until it reached its maturity and regular operation. Throughout each phase, the resulting metadata quality was measured to certify that the anticipated improvement in metadata quality actually took place. Based on the success of this first application, Nikos decided to validate the MQACP approach by applying it on another two cases of a Cultural and a Research Federation of repositories: VOA3R and Natural Europe, which allowed to prove the transferability of the approach to other cases as well as to present some similarities with the initial one.

It was a happy day for the whole IE team, many of whose members attended the dissertation (Enayat Rajabi, Rutilio Lopez, Paulo Alonso and David Marting among others). In the pictures below these lines, some moments of the day.

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Eagle project meeting in Ljubljana

The EAGLE project, Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy, celebrated its third plenary meeting on Tuesday, February 18th, 2014 at Ljubljana, Slovenia. The meeting took place at the National Museum of Slovenia, which holds an extensive collection of archaeological artefacts. IE member Eydel Rivero took part in the meeting as a technical representation of the University of Alcalá. During the morning session, project partners reviewed the project overall status and next steps for individual deliverables. In the afternoon, a training session was carried out for illustrating to content providers different details of the submission of content to Europeana.

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The first EAGLE international event 2014, “Current Practices and New Directions in Digital Epigraphy”, took place on 19-20 February 2014, organized by EAGLE partner Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Archaeology (Slovenia), in collaboration with Heidelberg University (Germany) and Sapienza, University of Rome (Italy). The doors were opened for all those interested in traditional or digital epigraphy an aimed to the dissemination of general best current practices for digital editions involving several aspects of digital technology applied to inscriptions. The event was divided in three workshops:

Workshop 1: Harmonization and interoperability of Inscriptions (Harmonization and interoperability of Inscriptions). The following points were discussed:

• The Eagle metadata model and its entities
• Europeana Data Model
• EpiDoc as interoperability format
• Trismegistos and geographical information
• Vocabularies and Terminologies

Workshop 2: Translations of Inscriptions (Eagle Working Group on Translations and content curation). The following points were discussed:

• WikiData as best practice for translations of inscriptions.
• An Edit-a-thon of translations of Latin texts on the Eagle MediaWiki

Workshop 3: Intellectual Property Rights (Eagle Working Group on IPR and user engagement). The following points were discussed:

• overview on licensing practices and policies in Europe
• how to deal with IPR
• how to properly label unlabeled digital items as photographs
• a photographic workshop on shooting high quality images for online publication and research.

IERU represents ODS in the final event of the Global Excursion project

The final event of Global Excursion project, took place in Brussels, from last Friday 14th to 16th of February 2014 at the European Schoolnet, where IE member Enayat gave a presentation in a workshop for teachers and project partners.

The Global Excursion project, whose main access point is available through ViSH repository (Virtual Science Hub), built over these 3 years a collaborative content repository where scientists and teachers are able to exchange and establish collaborations. As ODS is going to harvest as well as integrate ViSH to the ODS repository, Enayat presented Open Discovery Space in a workshop that was organized as part of the final event of the project and discussed both marketing as well as technical perspectives of ODS along with detail integration plan for connecting ViSH to ODS. A nice opportunity to disseminate our effort in ODS and create links to similar efforts in Europe.

 

Enayat presenting ODS to the participants in the event

3rd Herbal.Mednet consortium meeting in Rome

The 3rd Herbal.Mednet consortium meeting is holding in Rome, Italy, from Wednesday 5th to 7th of February at the Alternative Economy City (the citta de laltra economia). IE members, Salvador and Enayat, have participated in the meeting and were mostly involved in the technical parts of the Herbal.Mednet project. Project partners reviewed the latest status of project as well as the deliverables during the first day and made important decisions regarding the training pilots including organizing, responsibility, assessment methods, and courses contents during the second day. Last day is devoted to establish a calendar for the next 6 months of the project.

Regarding the interesting place La “Città dell’Altra Economia” (Alternative Economy City) it is remarkable that it is the first place in Europe dedicated to fair trade, ethical finance, renewable energy sources, open communication, responsible tourism and resources recycling. In times a slaughterhouse, today this place hosts exhibition and documentary areas, as well as many other separate activities on a 3,500 square meters surface. Below some pictures taken during the sessions, the social events and also some taken in the open areas of “la città”.

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