CrowdHeritage provides a platform for cultural heritage institutions to share their collections’ metadata that needs to be enhanced or fixed, and everybody can contribute to improving them.
The National Technical University of Athens developed the platform initially under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) program. The project is managed and further expanded by Datoptron, a company spun off from the University.
CrowdHeritage provides a platform for organizing online crowdsourcing campaigns to enrich and validate cultural heritage metadata.
Across Europe and beyond, the platform is used by cultural heritage organizations to improve the quality of collections and engage any target audience in the process through playful engagement; when the data has been enriched, it can be published on Europeana, making digital collections more searchable and usable.
By using CrowdHeritage, you can mobilize the intelligence of a large or small group of users to provide annotations (e.g. with semantic terms from case-appropriate vocabularies, geo-locations, colours, free text tags, etc.).
Aside from Cultural Heritage the platform is also used by the educational community and for citizen science programs here is a summary of the applications:
Citizen Science
CrowdHeritage has been applied in citizen science contexts that encourage public participation in academic research and help to increase the accessibility of study findings. Many campaigns have been launched showing how crowdsourcing and cultural heritage assets can be integrated into open and citizen science ideas in higher education.
Education
CrowdHeritage is a widely used educational tool in Europe that aims to engage students in crowdsourcing campaigns. It is a participatory approach to learning that involves students in digital collections, stimulating creativity and engagement. By using this approach, students learn about various subjects innovatively and interactively, which adds a creative touch to traditional teaching methods.
Evaluation of AI-produced annotations
CrowdHeritage allows users to evaluate automatic annotations produced by AI tools, such as colours detected by image analysis algorithms or translations of metadata. Human feedback is used to assess and improve AI algorithms, ensuring good-quality annotations. This platform can also be used for labelled datasets for machine learning algorithm training.
Find Relevant initiatives and Indicative campaigns here.
Our take
CrowdHeritage’s campaigns Cultural Heritage organizations can raise awareness of their collections among a broad audience, including cultural heritage professionals, culture lovers, students, and the general public. Streamlining and simplifying the process of aggregating and providing high-quality cultural data and the entire workflow for the data providers and aggregators.
I want to learn more:
CrowdHeritage: Crowdsourcing for Improving the Quality of Cultural Heritage Metadata
Wiki documentation
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