“Athena” - Research and Innovation information technologies

athina

The Research Center for Innovation in Information, Communications and Knowledge Technologies “Athena”, which operates under the auspices of the General Secretariat for Research and Technology of the Ministry of Education and Religion, covers a multitude of research areas of the Data-Information-Knowledge hierarchy, such as Databases and Information Systems, Cloud Computing, Data Flow Management, Query Optimization, Information Retrieval, Personalization, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Knowledge Representation and Computing, Constraint Satisfaction Problems, Semantic Web and Linked Data, Semantic Web of Sensors, Digital Libraries and Communication Man – Machine. The E.K. “Athena” is one of the most suitable bodies for the transfer of know-how to the project, as it has participated in major actions within and outside the European Union related to the development of new technologies in the field of Culture and, in particular, in Emotive, WhoLoDancE, CHESS, EFG1914, eCultValue, DYAS /DARIAH-GR, 3DIcons, ARIADNE, etc. In addition, through the Speech Processing Institute (IEL) the E.K. “Athena” becomes a valuable helper in the development and promotion of Linguistic and Cultural Technology in Greece. Over the past 5 years, it has completed a series of projects with the research object of developing web applications for digital libraries and archives (GreeD, POTHEG, POTHEG+, Digitization and promotion of the archive of the National Theater, Iconography, Literature at the same time, Monuments of Modern Greek Language, etc. a.). This activity was part of a broader national effort aimed at digitising and making available a significant amount of Greek cultural content. The IEL gained experience at all stages of digitisation, i.e. process design, cataloguing and selection of materials to be digitised, preparatory work, management of prototypes, digitisation, storage as well as semantic web issues such as metadata identification and standardisation and the control of the documentation and implementation processes of online collections. The IEL, having extensive experience in developing tools and applications for the management of electronic resources (e.g. corpora, lexical/conceptual resources and thesauri), has been involved in the unification of coding standards and the development of controlled vocabularies, while also exploring the area of standardised ontologies for the documentation of exhibits (CIDOC CRM). Finally, an important place in the list of research results of the E.K. “Athena” holds a story writing tool, useful for archaeologists, tour guides and museum curators to create digital storytelling in archaeological sites, monuments and museums. Its development and first evaluation took place in the Archaic Acropolis Hall in the New Acropolis Museum and in the Cite de l’ Espace open-air museum in France. Subsequently, it was adopted as part of research activities by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Museum of History of the University of Athens and its development is ongoing in the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük and the Hunterian Museum.