PATHS- Personalised Access to Cultural Heritage Spaces The latest prototype of the  PATHS system offers users a collection discovery environment which personalises their access and use of very large digital libraries.  The prototype demonstrates search and visualisation techniques based on enriched metadata.  For users it offers narrative pathways which can be followed step by step, while allowing them to leave at any time by following recommendations and links to related items and contextual resources.  Users who are logged in to the system can search and browse the collections using these tools and can save interesting items to their workspace for use in creating, publishing and sharing their pathways.

• PATHS – enable users to follow pathways (or narratives) published by other users. Users can follow a path from beginning to end or they can leave the path at any time by following recommendations and links. Users who are logged in to the system can save items to their workspace and then create, edit, publish and share pathways.

• SEARCH – supports discovery of both collection items and paths through keyword search.

• EXPLORE – enables users to explore the collections using tools which are being designed to appeal to different user preferences.

The thesaurus, tags and map tools are designed to appeal to different user preferences for accessing information.  As users drill down, each displays the same range of content using a different visualisation technique.

The demonstrator has been built using test data provided by Europeana. It includes around 2 million content items from Spain and the UK. The metadata has been analysed, processed and augmented using natural language processing techniques to provide  additional indexing and linkages before being integrated into the prototype application.

More technical details on Paths are available at: http://paths-project.eu/eng/Resources