Silvia RUSSEGGER / Thomas ORGEL
(JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Graz, Austria)

Keywords: cultural content, educational purposes

Abstract:
In the last decade, Europe conducted tremendous effort for making cultural, educational and scientific resources publicly available. Based on national aggregators initiatives like Europeana nowadays provide a plethora of cultural resources for people worldwide. Concurrently, the semantic web, particularly Linked Open Data, has been growing exponentially providing semantic-enhanced access to and interchange of interesting scientific and cultural resources.
Although such massive amounts of culturally rich, educating content are available, the potential of its use for educational and scientific purposes remains largely untapped. The primary reason can be seen in today’s Web’s content distributions mechanisms: content dissemination is dominated by a small number of large central hubs like major search engines (e.g. Google), social networks (e.g. Facebook) or online encyclopaedias (e.g. Wikipedia). However, much valuable content is only available in the long-tail (i.e. a theory arguing that in internet-based markets niche products are more profitable than mass products). In the long-tail content is maintained and curated by a large number of small to medium-sized professional organisations such as memory organisations (e.g. archives and museums), digital libraries and open educational repositories. However, the few large web hubs hardly support disseminating this long tail content. Changing this circumstance is the goal of the EEXCESS project.

EEXCESS will
•          improve the dissemination, exchange and use of cultural and scientific resources for educational purpose,
•          increase the interconnectedness between scientific, cultural and educational resources to trigger new discoveries and better usage possibilities,
•          increase the use of cultural and historical resources in research and scientific publication processes,
•          increase general public education through facilitating information and content usage possibilities for interested users and raising their awareness on the cultural, scientific and educational wealth existing in today’s content repositories, and
•          raise general public cultural and scientific awareness for an improved understanding and integration among European and non-European cultures.