INESC TEC and FEUP organise international conference on Digital Libraries
On 10 and 13 September, INESC TEC and the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) organised the 22nd edition of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries – TPDL 2018, which had around 200 participants.
TPDL was in Porto with the theme entitled “Digital Libraries for Open Knowledge”, and it arouse due to the “great interest, namely at a European level, of the several facets of opening up access to knowledge", explains Cristina Ribeiro, researcher of INESC TEC's Centre for Information Systems and Computer Graphics (CSIG) and responsible, along with Gabriel David, INESC TEC's Administrator, for the organisation of the conference.
The researcher praises the “multiple contributions of the area of digital libraries” in this field, namely the information search, digital humanities, research data management and digital preservation.
Besides creating opportunities to have “good international contacts for projects and other initiatives”, this was an important opportunity to get to know some of the best papers developed in the Metadata, Entity Disambiguation, Data Management, Scholarly Communication, Digital Humanities, User Interaction, Information Extraction, Information Retrieval, and Recommendation areas, selected from 81 received submissions.
The assortment of main speakers of the TPDL 2018 was composed of Medha Devare, researcher at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), with the theme “Leveraging Standards to Turn Data to Capabilities in Agriculture”; Natalia Manola, researcher of the University of Athens and member of European Commission's Open Science Policy Platform who addressed the theme “Open Science in a Connected Society”, and Martin Klein, scientist of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (United States), with the presentation “A Web-Centric Pipeline for Archiving scholarly Artifacts”, in collaboration with Herbert Van de Sompel, from the same laboratory.
The participants had the opportunity to participate in five workshops: “Domain Specific Extensions for Machine-actionable Data Management Plans”, “18th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems”, “Web Archive – An introduction to web archives for Humanities and Social Science research”, “Multi-domain Research Data Management: from metadata collection to data deposit”, and “Internet of Things Workshop: Live Repositories of Streaming Data”. The last two workshops were organised by INESC TEC members who, along with partners from other institutions, show the results of recent projects.
From the TPDL agenda, there was also a Doctoral Consortium in which PhD students with themes in the Digital Libraries area presented their ongoing papers and received comments and suggestions from a senior researchers panel. “This activity is considered essential to involve the younger elements of the community and to stimulate their participation in future editions of the conference”, declares Cristina Ribeiro.
The Secretary of State of Science, Technology and Higher Education, Maria Fernanda Rollo, herself a researcher with a significant contribution to the Digital Humanities and that according to Cristina Ribeiro “has been developing a strong action in the promotion of the Open Science”, was the patron of the TPDL 2018 and participated in the closing session.
The conference took place on the FEUP, simultaneously with the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, “attracting communities with substantial overlapping” and allowing “very interesting joint activities”, states the responsible for the organisation of the conference.
The researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC and UP-FEUP.
