Promoter - Information technology, research and innovation

Project profile

CULTURA - Cultivating Understanding and Research through Adaptivity – aims to provide innovative adaptive services and interactive environment for a genuine user empowerment and unprecedented levels of engagement with digital cultural heritage collections and communities.

CULTURA will pioneer the development of next generation adaptive systems which will provide new forms of multi-dimensional adaptivity:
• personalised information retrieval and presentation which respond to models of user and contextual intent
• community-aware adaptivity which responds to wider community activity, interest, contribution and experience
• content-aware adaptivity which responds to the entities and relationships automatically identified within the artefacts and across collections
• personalised dynamic storylines which are generated across individual as well as entire collections of artefacts.

CULTURA advances and integrates the following key technologies:
• Cutting edge natural language processing, which normalises ambiguities in noisy historical texts
• Entity and relationship extraction, which highlights the key individuals, events, dates and other entities and relationships within unstructured text
• Social network analysis of the entities and relationships within the content, and also of the individuals and broader community of users engaging with the content
• Multi-model adaptivity to support dynamic reconciliation of multiple dimensions of personalization.

CULTURA will deliver innovative adaptive services and an interactive user environment which dynamically tailors the investigation, comprehension and enrichment of digital humanities artifacts and collections.

The CULTURA consortium has a strong emphasis on meeting real end-user needs, maximising societal impact and laying a foundation for successful commercialisation. Thus, the project has a strong scientific foundation, informed by two significant digital cultural resources and associated communities, and supported by experienced and effective project management.