GVAM: technology promoter for the European culture and heritage

NEWS


7 July, 2021

GVAM: technology promoter for the European culture and heritage

GVAM, as a leading technology promoter in the cultural and tourism sector, participates as a partner in various projects of the Horizon 2020 European R&D Framework Program, the largest research and innovation program in the European Union.

In addition to the projects CrossCult (already finished project focused on new forms of digital consumption of European heritage) and rurAllure, whose objective is to promote cultural cooperation and sustainable tourism in the vicinity of historic European pilgrimage routes through new technological platforms, GVAM is also a participating partner of SPICE, a project we are happy to announce that is already one year old.

 

SPICE “Social cohesion, participation and inclusion through cultural engagement”

 

Under the title “Social cohesion, participation and inclusion through cultural engagement”, the SPICE project aims to develop methods and tools to support citizen cultural curation (understood as a process in which cultural objects are used as a resource by citizens). In this process, communities join together to develop cultural interpretations and museums participate to understand how citizens interpret their collections. In this sense, and taking advantage of new technologies, SPICE will enrich the physical and virtual museum experience through online and offline activities, allowing citizens to acquire a deeper cultural knowledge.

GVAM is the partner responsible for the communication and exploitation of the SPICE results, as well as the one in charge of maximizing the innovation impact of the project. “Our goal is to build a solid network of museums, professionals, researchers and other stakeholders involved, using different channels and work areas to test the results of the project and seek new formulas so that citizens can participate in this process of curating our art and cultural heritage” Jaime Solano, founder and CEO of GVAM, comments about the company’s participation in the project.

 

The project, started on May 1, 2020, encourages the participation of citizens in the field of cultural heritage, encouraging them to work with others in the construction of their collective vision of life from culture and heritage and obtain an appreciation of alternative cultural points of view. In this sense, there are numerous advances that have been made during this first year of the project related to the development of new technologies and methods that elaborate on this citizen participation approach in regards to curatorial cultural processes, amongst which the following stand out:

 

  • Research has been carried out on various methods to support interpretation and reflection activities within and between groups of citizens, culminating in the development of the “Interpretation and Reflection Loop” (IRL) model that converges towards social cohesion and its derivatives.
  • A solution has also been developed to explicitly set and define (manually) user modelling data, as well as an initial mechanism for community modelling and a multilingual semantic annotator.
  • A Linked Data Hub has been designed to interconnect cultural resources and enrich the museum experience giving at the same time to partner organisations (e.g. museums) and end-users (citizens) meaningful control over their data.
  • Analysis and development of prototypes for the integration and reflection interface components to be developed in SPICE.
  • Development of the technical research infrastructure – deputed to store, call and reason on the ontologies network for citizen curation.
  • A series of evaluation protocols for assessing the case studies and systems have been also developed.

 

The SPICE consortium, made up of 13 partners from seven different countries, will continue the development of the proposed citizen curation methods and technologies during this second year with the objective of achieving a more participatory and plural European culture and about which we will continue to keep you updated.