 In this project that I'm talking about we're reaching the bar a little, we're not talking about the everyday heritage around you. We're talking about the heritage that's decided by governments, by national heritage boards, the kind of monuments or heritage sites that's decided by people with the expertise and knowledge that this is important to the entire country, to the entire world. The things that UNESCO work with. Connected open heritage, it's the name of the project and I'll give a little bit about what we're doing with that. Most of you have heard of Wikipedia, I hope. The Wikimedia movement is bigger than Wikipedia. It's an entire movement, volunteers doing all the work. I'm not going to talk about all the projects here but the ones important are Wikimedia Commons where we store images, films and sound recordings of the importance that can help illustrate articles and we also have the new cool project called Wikidata that's the facts that's important to Wikipedia. The number of inhabitants living in a city, the year someone was born, how long a river is, that kind of facts that doesn't need to be replicated all over the 294 language versions of Wikipedia. Instead we can just put them in one place and when there's a new mayor elected in a town, we update in one place instead of updating 294 languages so it makes it a lot easier. So that's the movement and the background to this. The idea with Connected Open Heritage is that trying to get data collected in one place instead of having it all spread out all over the world in one database here and one database there, we're trying to get monument data from countries all over the world and collect it to Wikidata. To have it collected in one place makes it easier to see what was built during a certain time in the world, what was built during this reign in one part and how can it be connected to other parts of the world. And we're also doing it because every now and then archives are burning down, they're destroyed in earthquakes, data is lost. It's getting better now that most is on computers instead of on paper archive but there's still a lot of data that needs to be digitized and stored in one place and saving it to one place makes it easy to make sure that it stays on for the future also. And we're also working with the local chapters of Wikimedia movement around the world to reach out to their local governments and to their local organizations to have a wider reach than one country can have or that than volunteers can have. For this project we got funding by the Postcode Lottery Cultural Foundation. So it's a good thing that being able to work with organizations outside of the movement also because it helps open up doors. We also have a Wikipedia in residence at UNESCO so we have a door opener there reaching out to governments in other countries and they also are good at collecting data and setting that kind of data up in databases. So what we're doing is reaching out a couple of years ago in the Netherlands it started a competition called the Wiki Loves Monuments which we'll talk more about that later on and for that we built up a database. Later on we figured out that it wasn't a good thing to have everything copied from one government database to another database because things were updated in one database and not in the other so what we're trying to do is synchronize the data and make sure that things aren't forking into different databases because new monuments are added to the lists of the governments or national heritage boards and volunteers are improving the data within the volunteer created database and if we're not merging it together again it's two separate databases so we're trying to get that connected again and try to move the data to WikiData instead of having it in a separate database. We're reaching out and also not only collecting data but also trying to collect images of heritage sites specifically the ones that's at risk due to war or flooding or other circumstances that and also the heritage sites that's not around anymore because Palmyra for instance it's kind of hard to go there and take an image and say this is what it looked like because it's not there anymore so if we can find someone who has been there taking pictures it's possible to store it for future generations and having a lot of images we can maybe build 3D models and rebuild it as it used to look but we have to try to find the old images in archives and if someone has a travel journal from someone doing an excavation or something like that that's an awesome material to get to upload to Wikimedia Commons and to add to this collection. Some of the things we're doing to do this or to reach out is also doing editor tons where we improve Wikimedia related content writing articles about monument sites about heritage sites that's needed to to be improved translating it from one language to another because if I want to read about things that's in Arabic I can't speak Arabic so someone would need to translate it to English and then I can translate it from English to Swedish and someone can translate it from English to another language or making it more available in the world and the partners we're working with is both small archives huge national archives private collections we're trying to reach out to to companies that has done work preserving heritage sites how we can get them to release their material under free licenses and and get them to see the value of contributing with this material not locking it up into the in in their archive for no reason but rather let it out to the world and and make sure that others can see it see it as publicity work where they can also get more views and get a more positive image of themselves by helping with not only their core work but rather when they do something documented then and make sure that others can reuse it later on we're also working with the funding partners because they want to see this happen so so they're helping out in in this project and making sure that we can get out to new audiences and and make this material wider available what we're looking for as input in in a project like this is images and films the knowledge of the experts that that's both working in archives but also archaeologists and and people with knowledge about heritage sites and we're also looking for the data sets of the of the National Heritage Board for instance because they have a huge database that we want to have and and put it in wiki data and and it's not only one way cooperation because what organizations get back from releasing material and and working in a project like this is and everything is reusable so so if you need the images from a heritage site there's maybe images available on wiki media commons that you can reuse for any any reason any uh if you want to have it in a book or on your web page it's free to use and and also commercially you get knowledge back not only you but the entire world get the knowledge back when when you add it to to the wiki media project for data sets you get connections so if one site has a unique identifier we can say that well this unique identifier in this database is the same as this unique identifier in another database and by connecting them together we double the knowledge and and make sure that not only are the data connected it's it's uh multiplied when when you connect it together uh we raise awareness about the heritage uh sites at risk uh we look into why are why is it threatened why is it uh not taken care of uh we connect research uh this work well in in preserving a heritage site could work well in other parts of the world as well so so we're doing that also um institutions releasing material get the visibility back because being wikipedia and and in the wiki media movement were good with the attribution and and making sure that well this collection come came from this museum this collection came from this archive this data set came from this uh archive so so we're making sure that we're always telling where it came from and making sure that information is it's it's possible to go back to the original source and see how you can work with it from that part and with that i'm leaving for it to thank you actually uh so i work for wik media uk uh and one of the projects we run is the local branch of wikila's monuments it's the world's largest photography competition and happens to be based around the theme of cultural heritage since it started in 2011 more than one and a half million photos from 40 different countries have been submitted which is a phenomenal crowd sourcing effort we get photos from everything from Stonehenge and the Tower of London to georgian post boxes and historic statues in some cases these images represent the only freely available photographs of culturally significant buildings and archaeological sites we first ran the competition in the uk in 2013 we were a little late to the party the rest of europe beat us to it um the charity staff have been involved in steering it but it's only possible because of the work of our volunteers and the time they've devoted to organizing the competition uh having photo walks and judging the entries as they come in the competition is open for entire months throughout september and people are encouraged to take part by banner at the top of every wikipedia page people are asked to go out and photograph their local heritage when we began the competition in the uk we wanted to encourage people to find a new way to interact with wikipedia um beyond just the text we also want to improve the photographic record we have of various important sites we have we have covered within our encyclopedia and of course we wanted to encourage people to go out and interact with their heritage to explore what was around them and learn about their past the entries of the competition are a mixture of new photographs often taken during september itself and older images which just have to be sitting unused on old memory cards and we're collecting digital dust you don't have to be the world's best photographer to take part and hundreds of people in the uk take part in competition thousands do so from around the world it's really exciting for people to see a photo that they took being used on a website which is visited by 500 million people every month especially if they're helping document something which is important to them um I got in touch with an amateur archaeologist based in scotland who was using interesting set up to take pictures he was attaching a digital camera to a kite and flying it up and taking pictures from um several meters in the air and he was astounded to learn that his collection about 40 images were being seen by two million people a year it's a really good incentive people to get involved and share information now to organize a competition on this scale it's important to establish which subjects are eligible to this end each participating country uses their official lists of historic sites so in the uk this means we include schedule monuments and listed buildings of the various different grades now this covers around half a million eligible sites with so many to choose from it became clear that there needs to be a way to search those sites to explore them in a sensible way now when we first ran the competition in 2013 we only included 40 000 of these sites it was a real challenge to run this was because we ran the competition by running by creating manual lists on wikipedia itself it was incredibly time-consuming for our volunteers the software began to break when the lists were too long and unless you knew the name of the site you were looking for it was very difficult to navigate this information now since that first incarnation we switched over to having the information in wiki data and using that as the underlying platform this allows us to move the information to a website which is a dedicated database as opposed to a wiki which is mainly intended for pros doing so meant that we could begin to use some mapping tools so you could explore the information in a different way and it's much easier to interrogate the first step for us was therefore importing the data sets from from various heritage bodies this would allow us to set up our own search and mapping tool and importantly it could include a way for us to upload images directly to competition now some of the sites already existed on this database but it was only around 10 or 15 percent so a lot of information was being added for the first time we chose what kind of information we wanted to import so there was a name of the site the coordinates administrative authority and a unique ID the importing process was again done by one of our volunteers he essentially took an excel spreadsheet which contained all this information for each site and began an automated process to import it once this stage was complete the visualization process could begin it was possible to create a map of all the listed buildings or schedule monuments within a given area you could do this on an administrative level so the city of solford or the city of edinburgh as you can see on the map behind me or within say five miles of fixed points there's also a web interface where you can tell the tool to search for sites nearby your location using gps in your phone the distribution map here shows all the category a listed buildings in edinburgh so those which are most historically significant in case you're not familiar with edinburgh itself they're mostly concentrated towards the old town which happens to be a unesco heritage site and if you were to zoom in you would see that entire streets are made up of historically significant buildings this simple data forms an excellent outreach tool wikilos monuments uses this information to get people to go out and photograph nearby sites now the data itself is quite straightforward and it serves a competition very well because you can introduce a filter to say which of these sites we already have images for now we're lucky in the uk that we can run such competition because our copyright laws permit it in particular freedom of panorama means that more recent structures which might still be copyrighted can be photographed in other countries however this isn't always the case so in italy if you visit somewhere like pompe and take a photo of 2000 year old ruins you can't use that image without special permission the branch of the italian competition has invested a huge amount of volunteer time in liaising with local heritage organizations to secure permission to upload these images to wik media thereby creating a publicly shareable and openly licensed resource it's hoped that in the long term the competition can be used as a way to encourage countries to be more open with their copyright laws we're now at a stage where we're looking to add more information to the database about these historic sites so location information is wonderful but what what else can we add the more we have the more interesting stuff you can do with it so we can create a dynamic map but once we add information such as when a building was constructed who the architect was whether a site has been excavated you can create different visualizations so perhaps a map of all the structures designed by christopher ren or all the houses built between 1750 and 1800 because this information is created within a database it can be easily translated into other languages and it's already feeding through into some automatically generated content on wikipedia what this means is if a researcher is interested in how many quadrangular castles there are in the uk they can ask wiki data for that information and it can produce the result in french or spanish or even something like anglo-saxon or latin if you're feeling really fancy the plan for the future is to find more source of information and to enrich what we currently have wikula's monuments and connected open heritage often a way offer a way for people to explore and share their built heritage so keep an eye out for the competition running again next year hopefully moving back being late to the party is actually a good thing in for the uk because they're already in wiki data and the rest of the world is not in wiki data so they're ahead of us in this case what we're planning to do in the future as richard say do even more of the data connect even more of the data figure out new technical solutions the smartest people doesn't work for us so we need other people to get in and say we can do this also if we just get this data we can connect it in this way or we can build an app doing that or we can do other stuff that that we haven't even thought about yet and and to take care of the technical problems that that we have to overcome to figure that out build more visualization tools as he said we can get a map showing all the the castles of a certain time period built by someone using wiki data we can also connect it with the people who used to live there with the people running companies larger than having 3000 employees or stuff like that as as long as it's in wiki data we can do all kind of different questions wikipedia integration translation to other languages we don't need people to translate it we can to to every language if we translate it to to if we translate one specific term it can be used in in other in all the places where it's used so so we can get more out of it structured data not having pros having everything in a structured manner makes it easier for for computers to talk to them for traveling apps to to recommend going this walk takes you by several heritage sites that walk only a few so so take that walk instead and so so that's what we're working on we're also dreaming of of 3d applications how to figure out how to get 360 images that's being more and more popular with the specific cameras taking images all around instead of just taking what's in front of the camera how we can work that into material how we can make that easy viewable on on wikipedia and other sites and as Richard say free said freedom of panorama how we can make sure that throughout europe throughout the world it's possible to take building pictures of both buildings and sculptures and monuments and not risk being having them deleted because it's not possible to to show them in in one computer or another and with that i i think we're almost out of time so thank you