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.

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.

IE runs an Experiment on OpenSim as part of the SLRoute project

Spanish Learning Route (SLROUTE) is an industrial research and experimental development project whose main technological objective is the creation of a technological platform management, support and management of digital content targeted educational video game MMOG type.

The project is lead by Alcalingua in collaboration with Every View SL, Next Computer SL and the University of Alcalá, and has co-financing from Plan Avanza2 (Spanish National Plan for Scientific Research, Development and Innovation), the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) of the European Union (EU).

SL Route – OpenSim version – starting point.

IERU is involved in the project, as part of the UAH team (the Alcalingua UAH group is also part of the project), and is currently researching on the general factors affecting the acceptability of immersive 3D adventure games for language learning and the preferences of  the students regarding  non-guided social interaction mechanisms in MMOL games and to which extent they are perceived as useful or desirable as a complement to the typical guided interaction of adventure games. For this experiment we are using a small version of the game using OpenSim, developed with the help of 3DLES.

“Quick start guide to virtual worlds” by 3DLES

David (Martín-Moncunill) was in the Alcalingua centre to introduce the OpenSIM platform and interfaces to more than 25 Erasmus students, coming from several countries – such as Brazil, Russia, Turkey, England, Italy or Germany – and with different Spanish speaking levels; and explain the concept of the SLRoute game and its game mechanics, aiming to get initial data on the perception of the participants and their preferences.

David, introducing SLRoute to the students

David gave a short talk about OpenSIM and similar platforms and explained the SLRoute concept and historical context. Then, the students filled a questionnaire to get information on their previous computer experience and basic demographic data, and on their pre-established ideas about the kind of interactions with other human players (PCs) and non human players (NPCs) allowed and the degree of free play that they would expect or desire to have.

The results of this questionnaire are going to be used in the rest of the research process. We will keep you informed 😉 .

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

Organic.Lingua final Workshop in Rome

The final Workshop of the Organic.Lingua project, took place on Thursday, February 6th, 2014 at the premises of  (CAE) in Rome, Italy.  The event was co-organized by the Organic.Lingua project partners Agro-Know Technologies and University of Alcalá (UAH) and collocated with the Herbal.Mednet 3rd project meeting.

A nice skate park at the entrance of Città dell’Altra Economia

Salvador, Enayat and David attended the workshop, which was entitled “Using multilingual technologies in web portals – Challenges & Promises since it was focused in the multilingual outcomes of the project and how to enhance their reusability. The workshop started with the following presentations:

• Multilingual information services in the area of agricultural data : the use case of AGRIS (Keynote Speech):Fabrizio Celli (FAO)
• Applying language technologies in agricultural online services: The case of Organic.Edunet: Salvador Sanchez-Alonso (UAH)
• Managing multilingual vocabularies and ontologies: Mauro Dragoni  (FBK)
• A multilingual framework for transforming online services to truly multilingual: Giannis Stoitsis (UAH)

Salvador, during its presentation at Organic.Lingua final Workshop

At the end of every presentation the audience was able to formulate questions and considerations regarding the future of the project and how to reuse its outcomes. After a coffee break, the event continued with two focus groups, one to discuss about technical challenges and the other one to deal with user-oriented issues.

Participants at the technical focus group.

The event closed with a networking session in the form of a round-table discussion, which provided the opportunity to the participants to discuss on potential opportunities arising from Horizon 2020 and Connecting Europe Facility.

“Da Enzo al 29”, an amazing place!

An italo-spanish-iranian group (i.e. all IE members present in the workshop plus Victor Gonzalvez and Ana Lladosa from SEAE plus Luis and Barbara from AIAB) ended this fruitful day at “Da Enzo al 29” a great Trattoria, that we highly recommend! It’s good to know that almost everything is set up and ready for the next stop of Organic.Lingua project, the final review.

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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