Donna Kurtz DPhil (Oxon)

Professor Donna Kurtz joined the Oxford e-Research Centre as a Senior Research Fellow after a career in the Faculty of Classics, where she had pioneered the application of emerging digital technologies to Heritage. She was among the first in the University of Oxford to share digital research data electronically. When she was participating in EU R&D projects in telecommunications she also had one of the University’s first websites. While teaching undergraduates, graduates, supervising about forty doctoral students, and publishing widely on ancient Greek art, she directed many international digital projects.

Archaeology is a science. Classifying information about objects is a form of Information Engineering. Her Fell-funded CLAROS (2007-2009) was among the first Semantic Web projects. Its success lay behind the University's decision to move her from Humanities to MPLS, where she led the Fell-Funded Cultural Heritage Programme (2011-2013), AHRC Network Digital Cultural Heritage India and China (2014-2016) and the centrally funded OXLOD (2017-2018).

In autumn 2019 she established a Semantic Web research group in Shanghai. One of its members was a Masters student who was accepted by Engineering Science in 2022 for a D.Phil. He is now applying Open AI with Large Language Models to non-sensitive Heritage data under her supervision. In the same year she was made a Visiting Professorship in the University's OSCAR, which has facilitated collaborative work with some of China's highest-ranking cultural and technological institutions, for example, the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Shanghai Institute for the Science of Science.

Her future plan is to create a foundation model for opening, linking, and sharing research knowledge globally that can be adapted for other sectors. Heritage offers an ideal foundation because its data are deep, highly structured, verifiable to source, and of inestimable value to the future of Humanity. Their complexity also offers exciting technical challenges. By promoting the adoption of W3C International Standards and Open Source software her vision can reveal the huge potential of AI to "do good on the web" - to advance research, make expert knowledge accessible to non-experts, and bring benefits to the global public.

• Linked Open Data
• RDF Triple Stores/Sparql
• Image Recognition
• UN Sustainable Development Goals

To find out more about the OXLOD project, visit oxlod.eng.ox.ac.uk.