PATHS: Tools for exploring digital cultural heritage spaces

Significant amounts of digital material relating to heritage management and research have become available over recent years with the rise of online publications, digital archives, research infrastructures and aggregators such as Europeana. These large collections present challenges to users in discovering what items are present. Standard search paradigms for item discovery have worked well for those who are highly familiar with the collection being searched but as collections increase in size more powerful exploration systems are required. The PATHS project (www.paths-project.eu), funded by the European Commission's FP7 programme, brings together partners to research and develop a system to provide users with an environment in which they can successfully explore large, unknown collections. The project is applying language technologies to analyse and enrich manually created collection metadata, which is then exploited in the collection discovery environment. This paper will provide a guided tour of the PATH system and the tools developed to enable users to explore collections, collect items and form these into paths. Its goal is invite archaeologists to explore the prototype system and to evaluate the potential of the tools for implementation in research infrastructures and systems designed to present sites, monuments and artefacts to the broad public.