Meet the Members Council: Sergiu Gordea

Servus! I am glad to be part of Europeana Network Association and to greet you as a representative within the Europeana Members Council. Since 2010, I work as a researcher and engineer at AIT – Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, contributing to the development of several Europeana Network Projects.

A while ago, back in 2002, I started to get in contact with the tangible and intangible European cultural heritage, as an Erasmus exchange student in Angers, the capital of Region d’Anjou, situated in at the beginning of Val de Loire (France). That was happening during my engineering study at Technical University from Cluj Napoca, the most important city within the historical province of Transilvania (Romania). One year later, I started my Phd Studies in Klagenfurt Am Wörthersee, the capital of the Carinthia County in Austria. Here, my work focused on software engineering, knowledge management and recommendation systems research areas.

Le vainqueur au cheval blanc and Tenture de l'Apocalypse, Première pièce | Jan Bondol, PMR Maeyaert, CC BY-NC-SA

Developing services for the Europeana Platform

While enjoying the opportunity of becoming a culture snacker through my work on Europeana Network projects, my main responsibilities are still related to research work and technology development. Consequently, at AIT we are pleased to welcome the latest developments in the Europeana APIs, which aim at breaking the language barriers; improving the access and the understanding; and facilitating sharing of cultural assets.

Concretely, through the support of the Entity API, users and third party applications are able to access contextual information about named entities used in Europeana. For the time being, semantic and multilingual information about persons, locations and classification schemes are made available. In the next months, more functionalities powered by this API will enhance the user experience in Europeana Collections.

Cluj-Napoca, vedere panoramică and Kolozsvár látképe, Images Of Old Cluj, Public Domain

The first public release of the Annotation API was set for production within the scope of Europeana Sounds project. Its functionality opens a new gate for end users, which are able now to contribute with their contextual knowledge to Europeana. In the same time, this API offers new opportunities for development of third party applications that re-use Europeana content.

Several successful prototypes were developed in the past years to enhance the user experience and demonstrate the potential of re-using cultural heritage objects. One of my favorites is CultureCam, which demonstrates how the access to image content can be made more attractive and interactive for the end users. Still, the underlying value of the prototype is provided by the high quality content, which was manually curated for this purpose.

Pörtschach am Wörthersee (Kärnten), National And University Library Of Slovenia, Public Domain Marked

Reinforcing the ecosystem as a software engineer

In the rows above, I shortly introduced a few services and applications to whose implementation I contributed as developer. As software engineer and researcher I am willing to share my expertise within the Europeana Members Council and support the enrichment of the Europeana Platform, with more services offered to application developers and enhanced experience for end users.

I am looking forward to actively support the exciting activities carried out within the Europeana Members Council, and to contribute to further developments of the Europeana ecosystem. Not the last, I want to send a big thank to the individuals that supported me for getting the sit in the Council!