Digital humanities initiatives play an important role in making cultural heritage collections accessible to the global community of researchers and general public for the first time. Further work is needed to provide useful and usable tools to support users in working with those digital contents in virtual environments. The CULTURA project has developed a corpus agnostic research environment integrating innovative services that guide, assist and empower a broad spectrum of users in their interaction with cultural artefacts. This article presents (1) the CULTURA system and services and the two collections that have been used for testing and deploying the digital humanities research environment, and (2) an evaluation methodology and formative evaluation study with apprentice researchers. An evaluation model was developed which has served as a common ground for systematic evaluations of the CULTURA environment with user communities around the two test bed collections. The evaluation method has proven to be suitable for accommodating different evaluation strategies and allows meaningful consolidation of evaluation results. The evaluation outcomes indicate a positive perception of CULTURA. A range of useful suggestions for future improvement has been collected and fed back into the development of the next release of the research environment

Abstract. In recent years there has been a marked uptake in the digitisation of cultural heritage collections. Though this has enabled more sources to be made available to experts and the wider public, curators still struggle to instigate and enhance engagement with cultural archives. This is largely due to the monolithic nature of many digital archives; the challenge of understanding large collections, especially if the language is inconsistent; and because users vary in expertise and have different tasks and goals that they are trying to accomplish. This paper describes CULTURA, an FP7 funded project that is addressing these specific issues. The various technologies and approaches being used by CULTURA are discussed, along with the lessons learnt thus far, and the future work necessary to be implemented before the project concludes.

Ordinary users are finding it increasingly difficult to explore the large volumes of diverse data they encounter in their everyday lives. Techniques based on data mining algorithms are useful but they tend to be too complex for casual users to work with effectively. Furthermore, these techniques don't allow the user to engage with the information using semantics meaningful to them. Semantically enriched and personalized data exploration is seen as an essential step to support such users. Moreover, by allowing these users to leverage and personalize the subjective insights and knowledge of experts, more relevant and useful information can be discovered and interesting correlations drawn. In order to support these domain specific explorations, a prototype architecture named SARA (Semantic Attribute Reconciliation Architecture) has been built, and its underlying methodology, implementation and initial evaluation are described within this paper.

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Abstract. The increased digitisation of cultural collections, and their availability on the World Wide Web, has made access to these valuable documents much easier than ever before. However, despite the increased availability of access to cultural archives, curators still struggle to instigate and enhance engagement with these resources. The CULTURA project is actively addressing this issue through the development of a metadata-driven personalisation environment for navigating cultural collections and instigating collaborations. The corpus agnostic CULTURA environment also supports a full spectrum of users: ranging from professional researchers seeking patterns in the data and trying to answer complex queries; to interested members of the public who need help navigating a vast collection of resources. This paper discusses the state of the art in this area and the various innovative approaches used in the CULTURA project, with a special focus on how the underlying metadata helps facilitate its semantically rich environment.

Abstract-Almost all information domains have witnessed an exponential increase in the amount of structured data available. However, there is still a lack of support for ordinary users to create complex queries spanning multiple information sources. Until this occurs the real benefits of having such a proliferation of metadata will not be realized by the general public. This paper describes SARA (Semantic Attribute Reconciliation Architecture), which is a framework that helps users leverage expert knowledge to discover relevant information, and to draw correlations across separate information sources. These sources can be in various data formats, and are accessed by users in a consolidated fashion. Users are supported in their information exploration with the knowledge of experts, which they can further tailor to better suit their needs. SARA offers tools and support for domain experts with no computing experience to encode their expertise, thus opening up SARA's use to almost any domain where rich metadata is available. This paper discusses the SARA framework in detail, as well as describing the applications to which it has been successfully applied in a number of different domains.

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