The International Workshop on Archives and Linked Data was a satellite event of the 25th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2021). TPDL 2021 was an online event with free registration, and the same applied to the workshop. The idea for the workshop came from the team of an ongoing Portuguese national project, EPISA-Entity and Property Inference for Semantic Archives. The project is preparing models and prototypes for archival information systems based on linked data and ready for the semantic web. As the elements of the project team made contact with organisations and groups with similar interests, they perceived the need to discuss models, technologies, and infrastructures. TPDL 2021 presented the opportunity to do this in a European-centered community. Cultural Heritage deals with treasures that are expected to survive generations. Many digital initiatives have explored segments of this global asset, with much more to uncover. They tend to be oriented by the organizations that have traditionally curated these valuable objects: libraries, museums, archives. The Linked Archives International Workshop started from the perspective of archives, the guardians of immense volumes of information, both historical and current, driven by the need to keep a record of our past processes, achievements, and results. The growing interest in archival records and the availability of technologies that can take large volumes of data and process them is leading archives into the world of linked data. In this vision, the archives' information is joined with data from other cultural heritage institutions and more informal sources. Later, users can explore archives in rich interfaces where the data are available in their context, with explicit metadata. The goal of the workshop was to gather researchers and specialists engaged in initiatives that cross Archives and the Semantic Web and those planning similar initiatives in other cultural heritage organizations. We adopted an interdisciplinary point of view, aiming to stimulate the dialogue between the technically-oriented communities, researchers from the digital humanities, as well as specialists from cultural heritage institutions. The organisers invited 12 scholars and specialists to join the members of the Organising Committee in the Program Committee. Each paper was then reviewed by 2 or 3 members of the Program Committee. Given the specialised nature of the workshop, the number of submissions surprised the organisers: 22, of which only one was rejected for being off-topic. Some of the remaining 21 papers contributed mature work, while others presented preliminary results or relevant case studies. We decided to accept these 21 contributions and assign them flash presentations to allow for discussion and question-answering in the spirit of a workshop.
The participation in the workshop was quite substantial: 288 people signed up for the workshop as part of the TPDL 2021 registration, and 97 actually attended, with some fluctuations in the two sessions. The submission and attendance numbers convinced us that the topic attracts attention and brings about meaningful discussion.
Most of the contributions are published as CEUR proceedings. If reviewers found the work mature enough, a full paper is available. In works considered preliminary, only the abstracts are available.
The call for papers announced that extended versions of the best papers would be selected to be published in the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH). Four papers were invited to submit extended versions to the journal after the proceedings were completed.
Overall, we consider this workshop a very successful event, which may require in the future more than the two two-hour sessions we dedicated to it this year.
Let´s look forward to a successful second edition in 2022!
Irene Rodrigues Nuno Freire
Program Committee Alexandra Lourenço, General Secretariat of the Ministry of Justice of Portugal Ana Alice Baptista, University of Minho Antoine Isaac, Europeana, VU University Amsterdam Barbara Revuelta-Eugercios, Danish National Archives Carla Teixeira Lopes, University of Porto, INESC TEC Cristina Ribeiro, University of Porto, INESC TEC Daniel Gomes, Arquivo.pt Florence Clavaud, ICA-EGAD, lead of RiC-O team Franco Niccolucci, University of Florence Irene Rodrigues, University of Évora, NOVA-LINCS José Carlos Ramalho, Keep Solutions, University of Minho Kerstin Arnold, Archives Portal Europe Kuldar Aas, National Archives of Estonia Maja Žumer, University of Ljubljana Nuno Freire, INESC-ID Pedro Rangel Henriques,University of Minho Treasa Harkin, Irish Traditional Music Archive