Silknow

Grand Prix, Medal/Award in the category Research in the year 2022.

Applicant: Vicechancelor of Culture of University of Valencia (UV).

Reason for the award :

SILKNOW has created an innovative system to facilitate the transfer of the knowledge of silk weaving. This project represents an important example of how crafts, and therefore intangible heritage, can be linked to digital tools and how these tools can be used to democratise access to technical knowledge. The project’s machine-learning thesaurus is particularly interesting and has the potential to be applied in other areas of research.

Comprehensive intelligent computational system that goes beyond current technologies to improve our understanding and knowledge of Europe’s silk heritage.

SILKNOW is a Horizon 2020 project that produced an intelligent computational system that goes beyond current technologies to improve our understanding of European silk heritage. The project applied next-generation ICT (information and communications technologies) research to meet the needs of users in various fields, such as museums, education, tourism, cultural and creative industries.

Among the most important results were the multilingual thesaurus, which allows users to use local terms and phrases in their search terms, helping to standardise these terms. Another is the Virtual Loom, a ground-breaking tool that produces 3D representations of fabrics at the yarn level and preserves historical weaving techniques, most of which are only known by artisans who usually orally transmit their knowledge. ADASilk (Advanced Data Analysis for Silk heritage), integrates an exploratory search engine and a Spatio-temporal map, built on top of the SILKNOW’s knowledge graph that contains nearly 40,000 fabric entries with images and other relevant information describing them. Finally, the educational materials called La Ruta de la Seda were specially designed for learning Spanish while learning about silk in Europe.

Silknow is a project based in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovenia and Spain.

www.silknow.eu

Others awards in National scope: