About

CIPHER logo - Communities of Interest to Promote heritage of European Regions in colour

CIPHER was a two-and-a-half-year project that started in April 2002 and was supported by the European Commission under the theme ‘Heritage for All’. The overall objective of the CIPHER project was to develop the methodology and technology required to realise sustainable Cultural Heritage Forums that empowered communities of interest to explore, research, and build cultural heritage content. A Cultural Heritage Forum was defined as an online space where people could participate and learn through accessing and contributing to a range of heritage resources organised around a common theme. Users of the Cultural Heritage Forum were therefore engaged as active participants rather than passive viewers. Cultural Heritage Forums had an associated region that could traverse country borders.

The four Cultural Heritage Forums developed in the CIPHER project were:

  • Irish Cultural and Natural Heritage: This forum presented information from a large database of Irish archaeology held digitally by The Discovery Programme.
  • Nordic Heritage through Storytelling and Historical Artefacts: A forum built around the narratives represented in the Carta Marina, Circa 1539.
  • Shared Heritage of Central Europe: This forum provided online access to a large volume of data concerning historical sites in the Czech Republic and Austria.
  • Tradition of Technology Innovation in South Central England: This forum was built on the historical record of the cryptanalysis work done at Bletchley Park, home of Colossus, the world’s first programmable computer.

Team

Zdenek Zdrahal
Paul Mulholland
Trevor Collins
David Bradbury

Project Partners

Dublin Institute of Technology
Eion Kilfeather

University of Art and Design Helsinki
Lily Diaz

Czech Technical University
Zdenek Kouba

RiS GmbH Internet-Losungen
Dietmar Nedbal

The Discovery Programme
Anthony Corns

Publications

Collins T., Mulholand, P. and Zdrahal, Z. (2005). Semantic Browsing of Digital Collections. The Semantic Web ISWC 2005: 4th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2005, Galway, Ireland, November 6-10, 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 3729. pp. 127 – 141. ISSN: 0302-9743

Mulholand, P., Collins T. and Zdrahal, Z. (2005). Spotlight browsing of resource archives. ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT ’05), Salzburg, Austria. Available from the ACM Digital Library.

Collins, T.D., Mulholland, P. and Zdrahal, Z. (2004). Community Story Exchange. In The Proceedings of the IEEE International workshop on Presenting and Exploring Heritage on the Web (PEH’04) in conjunction with the 14th International Conference and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2004). Zaragoza, Spain. September, 2004. pp 74-78.

Mulholland, P., Zdrahal, Z. and Collins, T. (2004). Supporting the Exploration and Use of Heritage Stories. In The Proceedings of the IEEE International workshop on Presenting and Exploring Heritage on the Web (PEH’04) in conjunction with the 14th International Conference and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2004). Zaragoza, Spain. September, 2004. pp 79-83.

Mulholland, P., Collins, T.D. and Zdrahal, Z. (2004) Story Fountain: Intelligent support for story research and exploration. In The Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI’2004). Madeira, Portugal. January 2004.

Mulholland, P. and Zdrahal, Z. (2003) Methodology and Tools to Support Storytelling in Cultural Heritage Forums. In The Proceedings of the IEEE International workshop on Presenting and Exploring Heritage on the Web (PEH’03) in conjunction with the 14th International Conference and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2003). Prague, Czech Republic. September, 2003. pp 71-74.

Mulholland, P., Zdrahal, Z. and Collins, T. (2002). CIPHER: Enabling Communities of Interest to Promote Heritage of European Regions. Cultivate Interactive, issue 8, 15 November 2002.

Wolff, A., Zdrahal, Z. and Kouba, Z. (2002) Tools for Personalised Annotation and Organisation of Diverse Web Resources. In The Proceedings of the IEEE International workshop on Presenting and Exploring Heritage on the Web (PEH’02) in conjunction with the 13th International Conference and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2002). Aix-En-Provence, France. September, 2002.

Mulholland, P. and Collins, T.D. (2002) Using Digital Narratives to Support the Collaborative Learning and Exploration of Cultural Heritage. In The Proceedings of the IEEE International workshop on Presenting and Exploring Heritage on the Web (PEH’02) in conjunction with the 13th International Conference and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2002). Aix-En-Provence, France. September, 2002.

Collins, T.D. and Mulholland, P. (2002) A Cultural Heritage Forum Celebrating Technological Innovation at Station X. In The Proceedings of the IEEE International workshop on Presenting and Exploring Heritage on the Web (PEH’02) in conjunction with the 13th International Conference and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2002). Aix-En-Provence, France. September, 2002.