BelgicaWeb - Sustaining access to Belgium’s born-digital heritage

About the project

BelgicaWeb aims to open up born-digital data by making these collections available for (re)use and research. Making the born-digital data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) is at the heart of the BelgicaWeb as the project aims to offer agile search by developing a multilingual user-friendly platform and an API that will allow offering the collections as data. Particular attention will be paid to the needs of the researchers and other potential users through the establishment of a reference group of experts at the start of the project who will will iteratively provide input.

Concretely, BelgicaWeb will respond to the call by (1) investigating how to sustainably provide access to Belgium’s born-digital collections for both the public and researchers; (2) creating born-digital collections by capturing social media and web content; (3) aggregating existing (meta)data at KBR and enriching the (meta)data using linked open data, controlled vocabularies, Natural Language Processing or other digital methods; (4) developing the necessary data infrastructure by selecting the best (open source) technologies and sharing (open access) information and building on the best practises from international networks and infrastructures (e.g. DARIAH-EU, IIPC, WARCnet, RESAW); (5) analysing the relevant legal frameworks (data exchange, copyright in the context of text and data mining, data protection and privacy rights and freedom of expression) and (6) promoting and raising awareness about Belgium’s born-digital heritage by organising workshops at Belgian universities and facilitating interdisciplinary research.

The BelgicaWeb partners will bring the required range of interdisciplinary expertise to the project. IDLab, GhentCDH and MICT at UGhent will work on data enrichment, user engagement and evaluation and outreach to the research community respectively, CRIDS at UNamur will study the relevant legal issues, and KBR as coordinator will work on data enrichment and the development of the access platform and API.

IDLab role

IDLab (Internet Technology & Data Science Lab) at UGhent will contribute the necessary technical skills related to data enrichment. IDLab holds expertise in (Semantic) Web technologies, Social Media/Web archiving, semantic annotation and linking of heterogeneous data sources, Natural Language Processing and sustainable infrastructure for querying Linked Open Data. IDLab will focus on data enrichment in the project.