Ljudmila would like to invite cultural operators worldwide to join in a collaboration project to promote the networking of cultural portals under the title I3C - International Initiative for Interoperability in Culture.

The project will address the issue of interoperability at the European level and further around the world: the aim is to publicly discuss and establish the minimal standards and further recommendations for data sharing and (meta)searchability on cultural portals (e.g. events, addresses of cultural organisations, other content) under the slogan “Imagine a world beyond commercial algorithms!”

• Base: two portals being developed by Ljudmila for the Slovene Ministry of Culture:
  • Culture.si - portal for international cultural cooperation
  • Kulturnik.si (metasearch engine and cultural news-events aggregator) - Short info in English

• Our goals are to:
  • Provide Internet users with an open access to the wealth of cultural information from as many public databases as possible.
  • Liberate the search and retrieval of such data from the hands of big commercial “cloud” operators and return it to its maintainers and owners.

• Our objectives are to:
  • promote interoperability, which offers great benefits to general public for relatively small investment;
  • facilitate and offer open source technical solutions to the cultural institutions in order to improve the information system design and online publishing;
  • develop the missing commonly needed infrastructure pieces, based on open source technology

• How are we going to do it?
  • We need to consolidate the data formats and protocols - no more tedious technical work reinventing incompatible solutions to the same problems, over and over!
  • We need to provide sample code, ready to be used
  • We need to provide a sample of a metasearch engine implementation, aggregating
  • We shall share knowledge and models via working meetings and also public events, conferences, as the beneficiaries will be numerous existing cultural portals

• Funding (open)
  • local resources related to the cultural portals
  • international funding

• Steps
  • September 2012 - Ljudmila's initiative sent out to first potential partners, e.g. Agregator.si (NUK) and presented at the Public Database Reuse round table Ljubljana, 28. 9. 2012
  • 2013-2014 - partner search
• new partners:

- Arts and Theatre Institute in Prague, & Estonian Arts Institute

• • 2015-2017 project development

Collaboration with other cultural portals, e.g. Culturenet.hr, Culture.pl, etc.