Use Cases/Cross-platform annotation of cultural assets

There are two flavours of this use case, one for annotations created by automatic software agents, and one by manual users. Note: In the examples, the manual one is the one involving more complex relations between the assets being annotated, but the examples would also work with automatic and manual exchanged.

a) automatic

A portal providing cultural heritage resources wants to enrich the original metadata from web and social media resources in order to put their resources in context.

Example: Herbert has been a history and economics high school teacher. When he retired, he intensified his hobby on studying the economy of the German Empire. Once Herbert was tweeting about his hypothesis on the economic situation of the German Empire, referring to statistics published in the portal of the German National Library of Economics (ZBW). In order to put their resources into users' contexts, ZBW monitors tweets about their resources and an automatic agent adds an annotation to the page on ZBW’s portal presenting the document he used, referring to Herbert's Twitter account and website.

b) user created

A scientist using cultural heritage resources wants to connect different information she found about these resources and her own work.

Example: Sarah is a researcher working on the history of money. In her current work, she uses documents from different libraries, and she is also collecting examples of early coins. She uses Europeana to search across many institutions in Europe, and online catalogs of museums worldwide. She finds a type of coin, of which different museums have exemplars of, and provide different metadata about it. She creates annotations linking these records together, describing their connection and adding her own insights. For example, she points out that two of those records have complementary metadata, while a third contradicts in terms of the age dating of the coins. She provides her research results proposing a resolution to this issue.

(Contributed by Werner Bailer)