Athena Research and Innovation Center in Information Communication and Knowledge Technologies

CETI – Athena Research and Innovation Centre, Greece and two of its institutions – the Cultural and Educational Technology Institute and the Digital Curation Department of the Institute for the Management of Information Systems – participated in the 3D-ICONS by providing technical expertise and content.

The Cultural and Educational Technology Institute  was founded in 1998 in Xanthi, Greece as an independent research institute under the auspices of the General Secretariat for Research and Technology (Ministry of Development). It is now part of the ATHENA Research Centre.  CETI currently has 35 staff members, including 15 postgraduate researchers. CETI maintains a state-of-the art digitisation centre (http://clepsydra.ceti.gr ), an archaeometry laboratory and several collaborating departments (cultural heritage, multimedia, educational technology and computational systems), making it a multi-disciplinary research organisation that offers its services on applied innovative technologies in the domains of cultural heritage and education. In particular, the digitisation centre “Clepsydra” focuses on 3D technologies and their applicability to the cultural heritage sector, including activities on 3D digitisation, archiving, retrieval and visualisation. Other R&D activities, relevant to the current proposal, include: Cultural databases (compliant with MPEG7, CIDOC, Dublin Core, etc.), development of intelligent computing methods and systems, data mining, knowledge administration with applications to the domain of cultural heritage.

The Digital Curation Department of IMIS  was launched in 2007 as an independent unit of the ATHENA Research Centre, with the mission of conducting research, developing technologies and applications, providing services and training, and acting as a national focus in the field of digital curation. In 2010, it became a department of the Institute for the Management of Information Systems. It was formed by an initial group of scientists with rich experience and high recognition for practical and theoretical work in key areas for digital curation. The DCU is the only specialized Department of its kind in Greece and one of relatively few such centres internationally.