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St Albans, Herts, United Kingdom, 06/07/2009 – Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of Giunti Labs and co-chair of the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG), will open the event with a keynote addressing ‘Building Digital Content Marketplaces for Europe’s Knowledge Societies and Beyond’.
He will present challenges and opportunities for cultural preservation and exploitation in today’s Western ‘Knowledge Societies’ and highlight new digital content marketplace scenarios and case studies for the online sharing and distribution of educational and knowledge resources. These include the Maknaz digital repository (DR) initiative, federating all national universities in Saudi Arabia; the CalState Marketplace initiative networking the California School and University district stakeholders and its open and publishing content stakeholders, and Building Schools of the Future, a public sector initiative in the Birmingham district in the UK.
The keynote will be followed by presentations from leading organisations including the British, Dutch, New Zealand, French and Slovak National Libraries; universities, as well as content and solutions providers such as the BBC. The event is expected to attract some 150 delegates from all over the world.
On the evening of 24th June, Giunti Labs is also organising a ‘Deep Dive Technology Workshop’ on ’Using HarvestRoad Hive DR for Building Rich, Mobile, and Virtual World Repositories for Innovative Knowledge, Learning, and Information Dissemination Scenarios‘. This presents the new content indexing, caching and web 2 classification and mobile delivery features present in Hive 4.
It will also outline the open archive discovery and harvesting scenarios developed in leading EU R&D projects such as Sculpteur, where Giunti Labs interfaced its DR technology with leading EU museum archives such as the UK’s National Gallery and Victoria & Albert Museum; France’s Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Museč de France and Museč de Cherbourg and Italy’s Uffizi Gallery using Z39.50, Zing and SRW harvesting protocols and query by samples for 2D and 3D artefacts retrieval. These were used for building innovative 3D virtual worlds for distributing and reusing digital resources within knowledge dissemination and information sharing scenarios.
Developed for Deepmatrix and VRML, the technology is now under porting on the Sun Wonderland Virtual Worlds and DarkStar collaboration platforms in the new IRMOS project - awarded to Giunti Labs, among others, by the EU - which will add service oriented architecture (SOA) along with virtual and mobile content delivery scenarios to this initiative.
“Western societies need to re-invent their leadership to survive the global competition coming from emerging economies in the global labour marketplace and survive crises while strengthening their cultural stakeholders,” commented Giunti Labs’ Cardinali. “To address this issue requires an open and interoperable ecosystem bringing together open archives from Museums, Libraries and eGovernment initiatives; not single turnkey ‘knowledge platforms’.
“We need to develop an open and interoperable ecosystem bringing together open archives from museums, libraries and eGovernment initiatives to deliver new generation personal performance support and information access to our citizens, learners and trainees. This will help them develop new skills and competencies rapidly,” he added.
“Only by opening up our archives and unleashing the unmatched value of our heritage, can we survive increasing global competition,” he stressed. “And we need to act first in order to survive!”
Currently, Giunti Labs is integrating its HarvestRoad Hive DR and learn eXact mobile learning technologies with innovative delivery means offered by Sun’s virtual worlds and collaboration platforms in order to deliver the content that users need, just in time, where they are and to the media they have – be it paper, web, iPhones, Blackberrys and so on.
About Giunti Labs
Giunti Labs is a leading Online and Mobile Learning Content Management Solutions provider with global headquarters in Italy and offices in London (UK), Frankfurt (Germany), Lund (Sweden), Boston (US), as well as Perth (Australia).
Giunti Labs provides a wide range of solutions, in response to any content, learning and knowledge management need, covering:
• 24/7 multi language learning content production
• LCMS and Digital Repository Platforms
• Delivery solutions for mobile & wireless
• Consulting and professional services.
Giunti Labs is part of Giunti Group, a leading educational and cultural heritage publisher with roots back to 1841 and today managing all the Florentine Museums Network (Firenze Musei) and a network of more than 150 bookstores in Europe. Over the years Giunti has built a catalogue of huge dimensions (over 7.000 titles) and acquired new brands in Italy and worldwide.
In 2008, Giunti Labs acquired the HarvestRoad Hive digital repository system, which manages any form of content used in online learning, corporate training and knowledge management initiatives. HarvestRoad Hive can interface with practically any ERP, Learning or Course Management System and is already integrated with several commonly used course management systems, authoring and content assembly tools.
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