CATCH meeting at MITCH project

27 June 2008 12.00-18.00 hour

CATCH is welcomed by one of its project locations: the National Museum of Natural History (Naturalis). At this location research is carried out within the MITCH project.

The theme of the day is "Scientific Data Models"

Programme

Speakers:

Karl-Heinz Lampe is head of Biodiversity Informatics, as well as senior curator at the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig in Bonn, Germany. Apart from conducting cutting-edge research on issues of biodiversity, he is leading several projects that develop best practices to capture, integrate, and access collections of natural history museums cost-efficiently at a high quality level.

Paul Buitelaar is senior researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrücken, Germany, as well as co-head of the DFKI Competence Center Semantic Web. His expertise includes automatic information organization, retrieval, and discovery, ontology learning and population, language technology for the semantic web, and knowledge-based multimedia analysis.

Hans Nederbragt is CEO of Trezorix, developing digital knowledge networks and being a major contributor to the STERNA project. STERNA (Semantic Web-based Thematic European Reference Network Application) specifically addresses the many small cultural heritage institutions and content providers that wish to contribute to the European Digital Library initiative but lack both technical skills and financial resources to do so.

Location

The meeting will take place at the National Museum of Natural History (Naturalis). Naturalis is located close to Leiden Central Station.

Address

Darwinweg 2, 2333BA Leiden,
http://www.naturalis.nl/

MITCH

Text mining, a research domain of natural language engineering, has advanced to a level at which automatic language technology and information extraction modules can be applied to vast amounts of text and (semi-)structured data with textual elements. Textual data can be analysed on spelling, syntax, document structure and topical-semantic information. This project investigates how text mining can be employed to support the automisation of knowledge enrichment and understanding of digitised cultural-heritage texts and textual object data bases. The case studies are provided by Naturalis, the Dutch National Museum for Natural History, and focus on the vast numbers of unanalyzed and unlinked object databases and log books describing collected animal specime ns, and taxonomies that organize these specimens according to the progressing international conventions.
MITCH is a project of the National Museum of Natural History and Tilburg University

There is no registration fee. Please visit www.nwo.nl/catch (see calendar) to Register Online Now! More information: MITCH website

Contact

NWO - Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research - Physical Sciences Council
E-mail: catch@nwo.nl