JocondeLab DGLFLF Brigitte TRAN
Background My name is Brigitte TRAN and I work at the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. I am the project manager, specially in charge with digital project in the language field, at the digital and language section, of the DGLFLF. DGLFLF deals with language policies for the french government as one of the five general division of the Ministry of Culture and Communication. JocondeLab is an experimental project that has been made possible by the DGLFLF. JocondeLab is the first part of the the Ministry s semanticization program. This program aims to explore semantic web and big-data in a context of cultural diversity and technological innovation. 2
Joconde database Our starting point was the Joconde database, which was provided by an other one of our fifth general department, the general department of heritage. Joconde is an available online central database for objects, in the collections of the main french public and private museums, listed as Musées de France. It was created in 1975, and maintained by the Joconde contained over 475,000 object listings online and over 290,000 with images. The database is not only dedicated to the information of the public but as well to the needs of the administrators and curators of the museums. 3
Cultural Diversity Thanks to the online presentation of professional tools it aimed at facilitating the museums collections cataloguing and state inventory. This explains the great precision of the listings. Since the museums participate on a voluntary basis to the regular enrichment of the database, some can present a large part of their collection, while others appear more scarcely. The Joconde listing details are highly structured, using a special vocabulary, which allows for very specific and accurate searches, helped as well by the index. We wanted to enable all users from around the world to access major collections of French museums by making avaible objects and their images. 4
JocondeLab Thanks to the semantic web and the efforts made to link both the Joconde database and dbpédia.fr, it is nearly 300 000 records of the Joconde database that are now available in 14 languages, including French, English, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Catalan, Basque, Breton and Occitan. This is the first time that the French administration has made such a linguistic diversity available on the web. 5
Technological Innovation Let s look at few examples: Choose for instance "La jeune mère (which means the young mother): This record comes from the Joconde database. All informations in blue are from Wikipedia. Thank to dbpédia.fr. the same record is available in all the languages I mentioned earlier. Much more than a translation, it is a true multilingual experience since we have definitions that were written by native speakers on Wikipedia. In this case, the biography of Auguste Rodin will not be the same in Chinese for example than it would be in Portuguese. It is in those differences that lies cultural diversity. 6
Dbpédia.fr http://www.semanticpedia.org/ Another thing is worth mentioning: the Sémanticpédia partnership binds the Ministry of Culture, INRIA and Wikimedia France, under this partnership, the dbpédia.fr platform is freely reusable. And so for that matter, the Semanticpedia project s goal is to create new ways of using datas from Wikipedia and to offer innovative contributions to this encyclopedia. As a matter of fact Wikipedia is not only an interface for searching informations, but also a database to convey datas. Dbpédia.fr invites the users establish semantic links to Wikipédia pages. 7
Gobelins In this context we invited students of the Gobelins (media school) to come up with innovative ways to use semantic data. We ended up having 20 projects that all approached the data set in very new ways. This was a clear demonstration of how users can easily take control of these tools and approach the database with renewed imagination and innovation. 8
To sum up Contributing to the Ministry s modernisation plan is obviously an exciting opportunity, but it has been an even greater privilege to work with so many experts in so many different fields. I would like to insist on the fact that this project is interdisciplinary and so the the contribution of my colleagues from different department as an asset : for instance the heritage department, the sections in charge with software and digital program at the general secretary of the ministry of culture, the research institute for innovation ; and of course the Gobelins School, and dbpédia.fr contributors. 9
Thank you all for your time. Brigitte TRAN brigitte.tran@culture.gouv.fr 10