Papyrus

Impact

Papyrus targets to help people virtually gain access to the laboratory of human experience. The system will make it easy for someone to study reasonably well, and so acquire some usable habits of mind, as well as some basic information. Through Papyrus people will attain enhanced capacity for informed citizenship, critical thinking, and simple awareness. Papyrus role is to provide people with the opportunity to absorb history; combine the excitement of exploration and discovery with the sense of reward. Through cumulative skills in interpreting the unfolding human record, the learning of history will provide a real grasp of how the world is and was.

Historical Researcher: Up to now, an advanced historical researcher was somehow limited when it came to relate sources. The research model was rather static with little option for further modifications. Among its other features, Papyrus will offer the opportunity to a broader context suggested by dynamically evolving archive research. For example, a historian interested in automobile transportation had little opportunity for a connection to similar findings, i.e. a news archival research could reveal interrelated developments in railway or airplane transportation. Such checking was previously inefficient, but will be possible with Papyrus.
As far as the newspaper archive research, a few years ago it would be a huge task; as the researcher would have to either visit individual newspapers or go through their archive material looking for specific articles or search digitized newspaper archives available in the web.
Papyrus will attempt to improve the aforementioned shortcomings by allowing researchers to query for results in a natural manner, without having to focus on a selection of keywords.

Student: In a rapidly evolving IT era, students are overwhelmed with information. The internet offers news content and information (of dubious value) equivalent to thousands of newspapers through millions of web sites, newsletters, numerous instant messengers, discussion groups or personalised homepages.
The real problem is finding a way round this vast mass. This is Papyrus responsibility; to seek and provide young people with the finest quality of information. Papyrus tools will enable accurate targeting of news archives, with the additional benefit of related subjects, which will not only allow the students to achieve an understanding of different contrasting perspectives but also to seek further; Papyrus will therefore teach students how to think critically and how to gain reliable knowledge about their world.

Journalist: Journalists have a vital role to provide the public with knowledge and understanding; they should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting news that in a few years will be considered as “history”. But as they practice their craft in a world that is both technologically and geographically changing, they need credible means to guide their work. Only in that way will journalists serve their society in an ethical, responsible and constructive manner. The idea of Papyrus is to help journalists become more efficient journalists – produce accurate, comprehensive stories and spend less time doing it. Papyrus will be a helpful tool for a deep diving into knowledge; editors, (freelance) journalists, journalism students and also semi-professional reporters and bloggers will be able to overcome difficulties with terminology. They will have instant access to short, reliable and up-to-date historical information through the Papyrus digital library. We have to bear in mind that today’s Journalists are tomorrow’s historians; in some years from now there may be a Digital Historian who will be searching for our present. Journalists are also for that reason responsible for a truthful presentation of our current news; they must double-check the accuracy of facts, distinguish and separate primary and secondary sources. Journalists need a way to tell the clear story of the diversity and magnitude of the human’s everyday life.

Institutions: There is no doubt that cultural institutions play the central role in the development of the society as they are collecting, preserving and disseminating our memory. Papyrus intends to increase the collaboration between memory institutions and private companies in the digitization process, by providing an effective way for covering digitization costs; using digital products for commercial purposes in exchange of financial support. Papyrus represents a possible model for creating a cultural network in Europe. The original idea of Papyrus is to connect news providers and memory institutions into one production chain. The network will consist of news contents providers (news agencies, broadcasters and newspapers) and news content preservers (museums, libraries and archives); each of them will generate income by providing their services within the network and also by creating new services to users.

Apart from the undisputable advantages the Papyrus library engine will offer to the domain of humanities, both for research and education, there are also several innovations in the domain of computer science that will be produced as an outcome. The development of Papyrus will require significant innovation, models and algorithms, to be used as a basis for further research as well as for the creation of new tools.
Firstly, the modelling of an ontology for the representation of historical information will constitute a major accomplishment. Ontologies have proven to be a very useful tool to provide semantics both on the context of Semantic Web and personal information management. They are however a complex structure and there are still many open issues related to their effective modelling. Multilinguality and time are two of the most difficult ones and both will be investigated in the context of Papyrus. Ontology visualization is another important issue still not fully explored from the scientific community. Papyrus will contribute greatly to this respect, providing novel visualization techniques both for the ontology designers and the end users.
The research on content analysis of both texts and multimedia will also contribute significantly not only in the context of Papyrus but also to existing research on automatic or semi-automatic ontology extraction and annotation of multimedia content.
Querying with the use of ontologies to support query analysis and also possibly store the query results is another not sufficiently explored field. Research in the context of Papyrus will produce novel techniques that could be used in a wide range of applications.