prečaca

Home

Timeplan

Countries

Partners

Get Involved

Documentation

Exhibitions

FAQ

Discussion

Volunteers

Information for Data Partners

Information for GLAM Partners

“The greatest threat towards the cultural heritage is lack of knowledge and disinterest. The best way to protect the cultural heritage is therefore knowledge and information that is easy to find and free”

Lars Amréus, Director-General of the National Heritage Board.

About the Project

Connected Open Heritage is a project aimed at improving and creating knowledge about the immovable cultural heritage of the world (e.g. monuments, archaeological sites etc.) and making it freely available online for everyone to use. By making this information readily available more people will have the chance to learn about our cultural heritage. We believe that access and awareness are key factors in building an interest in preserving the cultural heritage and understanding its importance. This project will give more people than ever before knowledge about your country’s immovable cultural heritage through Wikipedia, one of the world’s most used websites with 15–20 billion page views per month from 500 million monthly readers. Interest and knowledge is needed to make people care and to avoid its destruction. To help preserve our existing cultural heritage and to understand lost heritage, accurate and reliable information needs to be easily accessible to everyone. Furthermore, even though documentation and information cannot replace lost immovable cultural heritage, it gives us a chance to understand and research it and potentially to repair or sometimes even recreate it. It is also the first step to discovering the cultural heritage in your surroundings and, for people who cannot physically visit the sites, the only way in which they may ever experience them. The project was made possible through a grant from the Culture Foundation of the Swedish Postcode Lottery. Thanks to their generous support we are able to assist you free of charge. Our aim is to educate the world’s population, and we have no commercial gain from this. Furthermore, as Wikipedia and our other platforms are run by a not-for-profit organization, we do not gather any detailed information about our users and we will never show them any advertisement.

Sharing your Data

The information we collect will be made freely available, through Wikidata, the sister site to Wikipedia which works as a platform for open data. Through Wikidata we can integrate the information into Wikipedia in any of its 280+ languages. This can then act as a starting point for the world-spanning community of volunteers who are active on Wikipedia to further enrich the material. By making the information more widely available we also believe that local communities, and the general public, can make use of the information in ways which allows them to both appreciate their cultural heritage and help with documenting it. Since the enriched information is freely available to everyone any resulting information can in turn be re-used, be it for tourism, as a complement to the official data or any other imaginable use. The information will be clearly referenced so that it is obvious that it comes from official data, while at the same time clearly labeling any additional information which is added so as to make it clear that such info is not official nor is the agency in question responsible for it. What we offer During the project we are able to support the the national institution responsible for gathering data about the country's cultural heritage, for free with our work (until the project ends the 30 September 2017). Furthermore, we are able to host the data online without any cost for the institution. The project is supported by a group of strong international partners, such as UNESCO, and we want more institutions to join and take advantage of this network. Wikimedia Sverige has technical expertise around working with cultural heritage data. We have worked with datasets from a large number of countries to bring them collections online in an efficient and valuable way — and to find ways for them to engage volunteers in a massive online community. We can assist the team at the institution ongoingly, every step of the way. We are not lawyers, but we do have an in-depth knowledge about copyright relevant for digitization projects and can help with clarifications and recommendations. We will also work to highlight the cooperation in external communication, through press releases, on social media channels, on blogs and on email lists. This will be done in cooperation with the communication staff at the institution.

About us

Wikimedia Sverige (Wikimedia Sweden) is a charitable non-profit organisation working out of Sweden dedicated to promoting free access to knowledge for everyone. We are a chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation which has the goal to “empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content” and most famously does this through Wikipedia, the free-of-charge and free-of-advertisement multilingual encyclopedia which monthly serves more than half a billion unique visitors.

To maximise the outcomes of this project we are working in close collaboration with UNESCO and Cultural Heritage without Borders as well as in cooperation with local partners.

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is a specialized agency of the UN working to contribute to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through education, science, and culture.

Cultural Heritage without Borders works with cultural heritage as an active force in reconciliation, peace building and socio-economic development in societies affected by conflict, neglect or human and natural disasters.

Technical Requirements

Licensing and usage requirements It is important that you agree that the information can be used and reused to improve different products and services, including commercial ones, without adding any types of demands on the users. The goal is that the information is as easy as possible to disseminate to as many people as possible and that people can help add to it. This way more people can be informed about your country’s immovable cultural heritage on places where they already are active just like the many other countries that we are highlighting on Wikipedia and Wikidata.

Types of cultural heritage The type of cultural heritage which we are looking for are immovable man-made objects which have gained official recognition as cultural heritage by either an intergovernmental organisation or a national or sub-national government body. Additionally we are primarily focused on the visible cultural heritage, as such we are less interested in either submerged or interred objects although exceptions can be made.

Data requested The following are necessary (to the extent they are known and available): Name – The "everyday" name of the object Language – A specification of what language the description(s) is written in ID – The unique ID of the object Address – The street address (or similar) for the object Administrative subdivision – The administrative subdivision in which the object is found. This should ideally be as detailed as possible, all of the following (or equivalent) are of interest: Region County Municipality District/City/Village (only if easily available) Coordinates – The coordinates of the object (preferably in WGS84 format) URL – The URL of the register (or URLs of individual list of sites if available) on an official website The following are not necessary but would enrich the data: Short description(s) – Ideally less than 100 characters in any languages available Object type – Type/function of the building or monument Year – The year in which the object was constructed Architect – Main architect(s) of the object (where applicable) Alternative IDs – Any older or alternative IDs for the object which may have been used in literature Images – Any freely licensed images of the object

Format For the information to be easily usable it is requested that it is provided electronically in a structured format. Desired formats are either: Excel/Spreadsheet CSV or a database extract Formats which may be ok include: PDF (where the text can be selected) Word/Text documents (where the information is clearly structured as e.g. bullet lists) Unsuitable formats are: Scanned pages Unstructured text (e.g. prose text where the different parameters cannot easily be isolated)