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The Artificial Intelligence for Media and Humanities laboratory (AIMH) has the mission to investigate and advance the state of the art in the Artificial Intelligence field, specifically addressing applications to digital media and digital humanities, and taking also into account issues related to scalability. This report summarize the 2022 activities of the research group.

Citation is a pillar for the construction of knowledge. By creating proper citations in a standardized way researchers can constitute a mesh of linked information for various purposes (from credit to reuse). This becomes increasingly important as the SSHOC Task 3.4 team confronts the realities of Social Sciences and Humanities Research in a digital age, when machine actionability takes on a renewed and vital importance. After conducting an inventory of data citation practices (SSHOC D3.2 “Inventory of SSH citation practices, and choice for SSHOC citation formats and implementation planning”) and analysing the citation of data in DH1 2019 conference abstracts in order to build specifications for the citation prototype, the team discovered a very diverse landscape of data repositories. As a result, the team developed recommendations for citation in coordination with SSHOC Work Package 2 (Communication, Dissemination, and Impact), validated by external reviewers. These recommendations were used to guide a deeper analysis of citation practices in various SSH repositories and how they correspond to these recommendations in order to have a better idea of the current situation. This analysis was carried out in both a quantitative and qualitative fashion. For the qualitative part, the main goal was to describe, in detail, a selection of repositories representative of the SSH domain. The choice of repositories was made in collaboration with the SSHOC network in order to have a good representation of the very diverse contexts in SSH. This qualitative analysis focused on how these repositories were constructed to provide data citation services in detail. For the quantitative part, a list of repositories was already established by SSHOC Task 8.2 “Trust & Quality Assurance” and the team took this opportunity to establish synergies and extract a list of repositories to be checked according to defined criteria regarding data citation. The analysis checked 85 repositories from a list of 125 against a set of 7 criteria. In order to facilitate the work, the team used the citation viewer which is part of the prototype mentioned above. The main result of this quick study is that while there are positive signs, especially with respect to the use of landing pages and Persistent Identifiers (PIDs), there is quite a bit of room for improvement as a lot of repositories do not provide machine actionable information. This makes the prototype the Task 3.4 team is currently developing to create actionable citations all the more useful. It also appears from this work that it will be necessary to manually curate some citations in order to enrich them and make them actionable as the information is not always directly available (e.g., a landing page provides a link to a page which contains metadata expressed in another format). The result of this study will feed the development of the citation prototype developed in Task 3.4 and also liaise with SSHOC WP7 “Creating the SSH Open Marketplace” to integrate citations in SSH OpenMarketplace2 with a “Cite As” property in the backend and Cite As box in the frontend interface. Another link exists with the very similar work currently being carried out in CLARIN for the Digital Object Gateway.

Overall description of the 'dataverse-lrs' plugin, a plugin enabling the integration of Dataverse repositories with the CLARIN Language Resource Switchboard (LRS) software, developed in the "Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC)" project. The software is available in the SSHOC GitHub repository: https://github.com/SSHOC/dataverse-lrs

The Artificial Intelligence for Media and Humanities laboratory (AIMH) has the mission to investigate and advance the state of the art in the Artificial Intelligence field, specifically addressing applications to digital media and digital humanities, and taking also into account issues related to scalability. This report summarize the 2021 activities of the research group.

The SSH Open Marketplace is a discovery portal for digital tools, services, and methods in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), with an emphasis placed on placing these resources in their research context. It is the SSH component of the EOSC Marketplace. Previous initiatives have shown that curation of content is the key element to maintain the attractiveness and the utility of a discovery portal like the SSH Open Marketplace.1 Thus at each stage of the development of the Marketplace, from the first ingestion of existing catalogues to the curation sprint, curation has been at the heart of conception. This emphasis, based on previous examples and the work done throughout the SSHOC project, has led to profound changes in the data model, definition of quality criteria, standardization of the content as the team adapts the machinery of the Marketplace based on lessons learned. This continuous work has laid the foundation of the development of Editorial Guidelines which will be used by future curation actors as well as the definition of their different curation roles and the organisation of their relationship.

Today scientific workflows are used by scientists as a way to define automated, scalable, and portable in-silico experiments. Having a formal description of an experiment can improve replicability and reproducibility of the experiment. However, simply storing and publishing the workflow may be not enough, an accurate management of provenance data generated during workflow life cycle is crucial to achieve reproducibility. This document presents the activity being carried out by CNR-ISTI in task 5.2 of the SSHOC project to add to the repository service developed in the task, functionalities to store, access and manage `workflow data' in order to improve replicability and reproducibility of e-science experiments.

Annual Report of the Artificial Intelligence for Media and Humanities laboratory (AIMH) research activities in 2020.

The Deliverable 8.1 describes the work carried in Task 8.3 "Catalogue of E-RIHS resources and services". With the term resource we intend any entity that may be of interest to a Infrastructure such as the one that the E-RIHS PP project is setting up, i.e. mainly datasets and services, but also people, organizations, instruments, and other entities. The catalogue aims at providing researchers with information related to Heritage Science resources available within E-RIHS through a formal model that helps categorising them according to their different features. Such features will also be used for discovering the resources in the Catalogue. The catalogue structure was designed to serve as the basis for accounting in-kind contributions and, in perspective, to be a single access point for resource discovery and access services.

The SSHOC project aims to build the SSH (Social Science and Humanities) part of the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud). One of the main goals of the project is to ensure that SSH will be present in EOSC and that their specifics are taken into account. In this regard, an important point is to be able to give high visibility to the research data used in Social Science and Humanities following FAIR data principles. This can be achieved by fostering "Data Citation" through providing a common mechanism to cite SSH data and build stronger links between data and publications. An expected side effect would be to enhance the reproducibility of SSH research, which is not very common nowadays. In line with these goals, this report delivers an overview of existing data-citing mechanisms intended for citing data, that are currently used in different communities with a focus on the SSH. It then provides some guidelines describing what is relevant in the SSHOC context with respect to the technology to be implemented and also about the structuring of the content.

This deliverable provides the results of two tasks within WP3 of the VRE4EIC project: Task 3.4 "Integration of Reference VRE and Enhanced Existing VREs" and Task 3.5 "Design and development of a GUI for eVRE". In particular: The enhanced VREs are extended implementation of the EPOS and ENVRIplus VREs which have been obtained by migrating the architectures of these VREs into new architectures that includes building blocks developed by the VRE4EIC project, in the context of task 3.3. The resulting architectures provide the involved VREs with additional functionality that extends their capabilities in significant ways for the underlying research communities, while at the same time prove the functional and technical validity of the Reference Architecture developed (D3.1) and implemented by the project. The eVRE GUI provides eVRE with an access point for the human user, thus addressing the usability of VREs, which is one of the main goals of the project. In addition, the present deliverable provides the Canonical Reference Prototype (CRP) of the Reference Architecture, also produced by Task 3.4 of the project by integrating existing technologies to implement the components of the Reference Architecture. The realization of the CRP has required the development of a Technical Architecture, which complements the Reference Architecture by selecting a set of suitable implementation techniques and open- source components.

This is the final deliverable on architecture in VRE4EIC. The first (D3.1) explained the methodology, approach and overall architecture. This deliverable provides details of the architectural components, interfaces and related considerations leading to the technical architecture and the canonical reference prototype. Components of the architecture have been utilised in EPOS and ENVRIplus and validated there; the reference architecture has been demonstrated with the Canonical Reference Prototype.

The present report accompanies deliverable D3.3 "Software Building Blocks", resulting from Task T3.3 "Development of Building Blocks to Fill Gaps" of the VRE4EIC project. As the name of the tasks says, Task T 3.3 has received as inputs the Reference Architecture (D3.1), specifying the components of the enhanced VRE (e-VRE for short), and the Gap Analysis (D3.2), indicating which components needs to be implemented to fill the gaps in existing VREs. Based on these inputs, as well on the non-functional requirements collected in D2.1, Task T3.3 has designed a Technical Architecture for implementing the Reference Architecture, and has implemented the components of the Technical Architecture indicated by the Gap Analysis. These components will be taken as input by Task T3.4 "Integration of Reference VRE and Enhanced Existing VREs" to be integrated into the architectures of the EPOS and the ENVRIplus VREs (Task 3.4), thereby enhancing these VREs. D3.3 delivers the implemented components of the Technical Architecture, named "Building Blocks" (BBs from now on for short) for their role in the enhancement of the VREs.

This paper describes the Reference Architecture of the enhanced VRE (e-VRE), a Virtual Research Environment defined in the context of the VRE4EIC Project, funded by EU H2020 e-Infrastructure program. e-VRE is designed to overcome limits of existing VREs with respect to a number of orthogonal dimensions: improving the quality of VRE user experience by providing user centered, secure, privacy compliant, sustainable environments for accessing data, composing workflows and tracking data publications; increasing VRE usage in multidisciplinary research domains by abstracting and reusing building blocks and workflows from existing VRE initiatives; improving the interoperability of heterogeneous discovery, contextual and detailed metadata across all layers of the VRE.

For the e-VRE being developed by the VRE4EIC project, the security, privacy and trust requirements significantly vary amongst the potential end-users from various research domains and public. In deliverable D5.1, the VRE4EIC project has defined the strategies handling potential issues and risks regarding security, privacy and trust aspects. However, these strategies are mainly produced to help the technical developers better design the e-VRE and choose appropriate technologies for the implementation of the e-VRE. We assume that most of the potential end-users will have limited ICT knowledge so that they may have a different understanding or interpretation regarding these strategies to deal with security, privacy and trust related issues. In order to help our potential end- users understand the logic and consideration of the strategies developed in D5.1, this deliverable clarifies these strategies in the early stage of e-VRE development. The user is a global actor representing any user accessing the e-VRE (according to its definition, "VRE users" only concern people that want to access research data). This approach will also help the engagement of potential end-users. After implementing an e-VRE prototype that will be tested by user groups, a second version of this deliverable will be completed in Month 33 (D5.4). Upon acceptance of this strategy document, it will be made publicly available and especially distributed to target users of the existing e-RI initiatives and VRE-related initiatives.

Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are rapidly becoming a popular technology for supporting scientists during their research work. In order to overcome the current heterogeneity, a reference architecture for VREs is being developed by the VRE4EIC Project.

The aim of the task reported in this Deliverable 4.3 was to explore how we could arrive at shared metadata enrichment, by making the most of the large amount of data already gathered in Europeana and the Cloud environment developed in the project. We explored whether we could enrich the data by comparing Europeana data with data from external sources (task 4.3.1). Secondly, we explored whether there was data internally in the large Europeana set that could meaningfully be connected to other data in the set (task 4.3.2). Both approaches would offer better contextualisation of Europeana data for the end user. In Task 4.3.1, ISTI­CNR demonstrated the use of image recognition techniques to explore possible overlap between the datasets of Europeana and the WikiArt data set. As a side effect, it showed that duplicates within the Europeana data set might also surface. The pilot showed how information from an external resource such as WikiArt can potentially be used to enrich the data that is already held in Europeana. A second test phase in February 2016 will increase the Europeana and WikiArt datasets, ensure a more precise selection and focus on paintings held in Europeana, improve matching against WikiArt, and enhance performance.

This deliverable presents the initial Reference Architecture of the VRE4EIC Project. The Reference Architecture is one of the results of the first year of work of the project. In order to derive it, the project conducted more than sixty interviews, and carefully characterized five existing e-Research Infrastructures. This way, it obtained a significant picture of the needs of the scientists, and of how these needs are met by the existing e-Research Infrastructures. This picture was an input to the architects of the Project, who analysed it in detail, and distilled an exhaustive list of functions whose implementation is needed to satisfy the requirements in ways that advance the current e-Research Infrastructures. Competence in software system design and development, as well as consideration of existing standards and best practices, allowed the VRE4EIC architects to group functions into components, and to further structure components in sub-components, thereby laying the basic building blocks of the Reference Architecture. Each component or sub-component was assigned a set of interfaces, each consisting of methods performing the tasks that provide the lowest level of granularity of the Reference Architecture. An intense activity of verification then ensued, aiming at verifying that the methods on the component interfaces could be appropriately composed into complex workflows able to realize the required functionality. The deliverable presents the result of this work, and documents the activities and the decisions that led to it. Based on this solid piece of work, the project is entering its second year of activity. While keeping the Reference Architecture aligned with additionally collected requirements and e-RI characterizations, a gap analysis will be conducted to assess two existing Virtual Research Environments with respect to the Reference Architecture. The gap analysis will allow the project to select the components of the Reference Architecture that will be implemented in order to enhance the selected Virtual Research Environments. As a result of these activities, at the end of the project the final Reference Architecture will be released.

The report presents the work carried out over seven months in 2015, during which our group has: - inventoried relevant semantic enrichment work in the Europeana Network in the past years. We have tried to do this in a way that we hope will facilitate identification and use of services relevant to the application that needs them. This includes general considerations on the diversity of the processes at hand and a focus on interoperability issues. - further developed criteria to select datasets for semantic enrichment and illustrate with a thorough analysis of selected examples - explored methodological issues for the evaluation of semantic enrichment services - performed a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of seven enrichment services on a same subset of the Europeana dataset, containing 17.300 records. This report, together with its two companion documents and a data space on the Europeana Assembla, presents all this. We have also included, as a conclusion, a number of lessons learned we think should be considered for the design and enhancement of enrichment services as well as for their evaluation.

The first part of this paper describes the motivation, the main features and the current implementation state of the Linked Open data Framework. In conclusions we try to outline some possible development lines in order to build the Semantic Web paradigm defined by Tim Berners Lee.

The paper presents an overview of the user generated content service that the ASSETS Best Practice Network has designed, implemented and evaluated with the user for Europeana, the European digital library. The service will allow Europeana users to contribute to the contents of the digital library in several different ways, such as uploading simple media objects along with their descriptions, annotating existing objects, or enriching existing descriptions. The user and the system requirements are outlined first, and used to derive the basic principles underlying the service. A conceptual model of the entities required for the realization of the service and a general sketch of the system architecture are also given, and used to illustrate the basic workflow of some important operations.

This is a technical document detailing the ASSETS architecture and API for each component. It integrates and extends results of the first year mainly from T2.0.4 "Platform design and implementation guidelines" and T2.0.5 "API Specifications", but it introduces technical aspects of all the software services defined, analysed, implemented and tested in ASSETS WP2.1, WP2.2, WP2.3, WP2.4, WP2.5 and WP3.2. This document provides the following information regarding the Assets Services: The rationale behind the service choices; The approach and methodology of proposed solutions; The services description and the definition of their interfaces (APIs); The data models and data flows exchanged between services. This documentation is the basis for the development activities, because identifies the components, their responsibilities data models and interfaces. Through the iteration, as yet occurred during the first year, the data models and interfaces will be refined and enriched with further details. More, even if an improved User Interface is expected on next months, yet in this document ASSETS is able to present some anticipations with preliminary results and mock-ups, carried out during this year. Those are shown for better describing and clarifying how the ASSETS services are/will be used for improving access and usability of Europeana.

This internal document provides the following information regarding the Assets Services: . the service description; . the definition of the interfaces; . the data models and data flows exchanged between services. It integrates results from both T2.0.4 "Platform design and implementation guidelines" and T2.0.5 "API Specifications". This documentation is the basis for the development activities, because identifies the components, their responsibilities and, a preliminary definition of data models and interfaces. Through the iteration, the data model models and interfaces will be refined and enriched with further details. In this perspective, this documentation could be considered the most important contribution for the next deliverable D2.0.4 "The ASSETS APIs", expected for month 12.

In the wide public Europeana is primarily perceived as a portal exposing a great amount of cultural heritage information. Even though this perception is not entirely misleading, the main goal of Europeana rather is to build an open services platform enabling users and cultural institutions to access and manage a large collection of surrogate objects representing digital and digitised content via an Application Program Interface (API). The paper covers some details of the overall data space schema, of the API description and of the Europeana Portal implementation; it also discusses use cases and the mental approach that users, in particular cultural institutions, should adopt to completely exploit the potential of the Europeana services platform together with a discussion of related risks.

Issues and challenges in building the data space for the first Europeana prototype.

Searching the Web can be frustrating if the sought information is not related to a well defined and popular topic of interest or supplied by renowned Web Sites. One of the main goal of the activities in the area of the Semantic Web is to overcome this problem. The Digital Library (DL) arena is a suitable place to take up the challenge. The growing interest in the Digital Libraries along with the publishing of generalized software that simplifies the building of such systems, has recently improved the standardization of concept and functionalities of DLs, DL Systems and DL Management Systems (DLMS). A significant contribution in this area has been given by EU-funded projects in this area, namely DELOS, BRICKS and DILIGENT. This paper describes the Query Manager of the BRICKS- DLMS, which implements a distributed information retrieval capability, offered in the form of simple search (Google-like) or of advanced search, the latter based on knowledge represented by metadata coming from different schemas. Cross-language discovery, and personalized query and query results, based on user profiles, are other significant characteristics of BRICKS-DLMS Query Manager.

The BRICKS-Desktop is a GUI allowing the digital librarian to interact with the Digital Library Management System (DLMS) BRICKS, which has been developed in the context of the FP6 European Project "Building Resources for Integrated Cultural Knowledge Services". Small cultural heritage institutions requiring to implement, publish and manage their databases face many problems, of a technical and an economical nature. While the BRICKS DLMS provides services to share information in an easy and inexpensive way, the BRICKS-Desktop copes with user interaction and information visualization, offering an easy to use DL GUI Subsystem. The BRICKS-Desktop allows to browse the DL collections of digital objects, manage such collections, import/export digital objects, and perform cross-language search, documents visualization, and so on. The BRICKS-Desktop offers a twofold benefit: a) it supplies a ready to use GUI for expert users of DLs, and b) it allows to build more complex and user oriented GUIs for specific DL tasks, supplying the building blocks (as plug-ins) that hide the interaction with the DLMS. The user interface of the BRICKS-Desktop is built following the desktop GUI paradigm; the implementation of facilities like drag and drop hides to users the distributed nature of the underlying digital objects repository. The Bricks Desktop is based on OSGi technology, its functionalities are implemented as services deployed by specific bundles; functionalities can be then added or removed simply by manipulating bundles.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) techniques are today widely adopted to build Enterprise Information Systems. Moreover the increasing reliability of tools and techniques stemming from the 'Internet revolution' is rendering ever more convenient to base the development of new applications on Web technology, especially because of the great advantages it affords in terms of scalability and distribution. These two approaches can be used together to develop highly integrated and flexible computer systems for powerful Web-based Information Systems (WIS). In the paper we'll discuss the fundamental architectures in Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and present issues that need to be tackled in using EAI technologies for building Public Access WIS.

The HCI subsystem is an essential component of an Information System, whose success inside an organization strongly depend on user acceptance. A good UI design considering usability and accessibility is to the base of a system implementation that could be quite complex, particularly when a user interaction with different devices is required. The cost of such implementation, especially for large system, could be relevant, so any tool or method for automatic (or semi-automatic) GUI generation would be welcomed. In Web Based Information Systems, data entry Uis, interacting with Data Manager are a significant part of the whole HCI subsystem and usually implement a limited set of metaphors to allow reuse of components in different contexts. For this kind of UIs the complexity of automatic generation can be reduced. In this paper we first present a review of the existing open-source tools for automatic GUI development, then, we present a case study of GUI automatic generation in a Public Access WIS context.

This document is the final report of the "Sistema informativo SVS" project, whose main goal is the design and implementation of advanced features for "INFEA", a Web-based Information System formerly developed for the "Italian Ministry of The Environment" by CNUCE - CNR institute (now ISTI-CNR). New tools have been implemented in SVS to enable system users to store retrieve and evaluate project proposals, to manage projects financing and to build sophisticated reports. Moreover the module implementing asynchronous communication has been completely redesigned and implemented using a MOM framework; security has been improved using stronger encryption in digital certificates and the DBMS has been tuned. Another major change is that the web server functionalities have been embedded in the computer system

The paper briefly describes a public access web information system designed and implemented by the ISTI WIS research unit currently used by the "Servizio Sostenibile", a division of the Italian Ministry of Environment. The system goal is to promote and coordinate nation-wide programmes and initiatives for the public on environmental awareness, education and training. The implemented "computer component" provides tools for management, research, and information dissemination. The users of the information system are distributed over the Italian territory and connected via Internet, they play different roles based on their skill and responsibility.

The ever-increasing growth and penetration of Application Integration technologies and market is bringing about significant changes in how Enterprise Information Systems are organized and managed. Moreover, the increasing reliability of tools and techniques stemming from the "Internet revolution" is rendering it ever more convenient to base the development of new applications on this technology, especially because of the great advantages it affords in terms of scalability and distribution. These two principles lead to development of computer systems highly scalable and whose different components should be integrated allowing information exchanges between them. The main technique adopted to achieve this aim is the so-called Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). The present paper deals with the fundamental characteristics and current trends of Application Integration and related technologies and illustrates the problems that need to be tackled in development and management of an integrated and flexible enterprise information system.

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The ever-increasing growth and penetration of the World Wide Web and associated technologies is bringing about significant changes in how information is organized and managed, with far-reaching consequences for the information systems of a great number of organizations. Moreover, the increasing reliability of tools and techniques stemming from the "Web revolution" is rendering it ever more convenient to base the development of new applications on this technology, especially because of the great advantages it affords in terms of scalability and distribution. The present article deals with the fundamental characteristics of information systems based on Web technology and illustrates the problems that need to be tackled in their development and management. By way of concrete example, an information system implemented for the Italian Ministry of the Environment is briefly discussed.

Starting from may 1998 the "Istituto per lo Sviluppo della Formazione Professionale dei Lavoratori" (ISFOL), at the request of the Italian Ministry of the Environment, begins to render accessible via Web the results of a nation-wide census on the teaching and training activities pertaining to environmental themes carried out at Italian universities, secondary schools and professional training centres. The paper documents in brief the technical solutions adopted in implementing that part of the Web accessible information system relative to querying the database via the WWW. The system has been realised using currently available Java technologies such as applets and servlets interfaced to the database system through the JDBC. The paper also introduce the evolution of the system.

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