Semantic Web, Linked Data:the Europeana case(s)
Antoine Isaac
Europeana
Vogin-ip-lezing, March 20, 2014
Europeana.eu, Europe’s cultural heritage portal
Text
Image
Video
Sound
3D
30M objects from 2,200 galleries, museums, archives and libraries
A broad, heterogeneous network
Audiovisual collections
National Aggregators
Regional Aggregators
Archives
Thematic collections
Libraries
Musées Lausannois
Culture.frThe European Library
APEX
European Film Gateway Europeana Fashion
2,300 galleries, museums, archives and libraries
A distribution channel
What Europeana gets (and makes available)
Descriptive metadata
Link to digital objects online
Making metadata work better
Creating a new Europeana Data Model
http://pro.europeana.eu/edm-documentation
Prior to EDM: flat records
dc:contributor, dc:creator, dc:date, dc:format, dc:identifier, dc:language, dc:publisher, dc:relation, dc:source, dcterms:alternative, dcterms:extent, dcterms:temporal, dcterms:medium, dcterms:created, dcterms:provenance, dcterms:issued, dcterms:conformsTo, dcterms:hasFormat, dcterms:isFormatOf, dcterms:hasVersion, dcterms:isVersionOf, dcterms:hasPart, dcterms:isPartOf, dcterms:isReferencedBy, dcterms:references, dcterms:isReplacedBy, dcterms:replaces dcterms:isRequiredBy, dcterms:requires dcterms:tableOfContents
europeana:type, europeana:dataProvider, europeana:provider, europeana:isShownAt, europeana:isShownBy, europeana:object, europeana:rights
No links e.g. between objects and context entities (persons, places)
Mixing data on real object and digital content
A lot of mapping quality problems
EDM: an example
More granular metadata
Harvesting thesauri as linked data
Contextual resources – multilingual & semantic linked data for Concepts
<skos:Concept rdf:about="http://www.mimo-db.eu/InstrumentsKeywords/2251"> <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="">Harpsichord</skos:prefLabel> <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="de">Cembalo</skos:prefLabel> <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="sv">Cembalo</skos:prefLabel> <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="fr">Clavecin</skos:prefLabel> <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="it">Clavicembalo</skos:prefLabel> <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="en">Harpsichord</skos:prefLabel> <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="nl">Klavecimbel</skos:prefLabel> <skos:broader> <skos:Concept rdf:about="http://www.mimo-db.eu/InstrumentsKeywords/2239"/> </skos:broader></skos:Concept>
Contextual Resources – Places
Collaborative, soft standardization
EDM is a cross-community development, involving library, archive and museum experts, plus academic partners
A data model that re-uses several existing Semantic Web-based models
Different semantic grains
Adopts Semantic Web principle of specializing classes and properties
Enables extensions, “applications profiles”, based on needs and best practices from specific sectors or domains
Ready for metadata enrichment
Already re-using third-party sources
• GEMET, GeoNames, DBpedia
Enrichment by providers or Europeana
• In collaboration!
• Example: Getty vocabularieshttp://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/lod/
Facilitating re-use
Multiple Channels
Search API
Results in JSON, JSON-LD, RDF/XML
Semantic mark-up on portal
schema.org, OpenGraph
Linked Open Data prototype
Content negotiation, RDF dumps, SPARQL endpoint
Content - digital objects on the site of the provider
Metadata - descriptive object information
Different options
The legal side of data
CC
Europeana and partners provide open metadata
Benefiting from existing R&D efforts
EuropeanaTechcommunity
pro.europeana.eu/europeana-tech
Innovation - Searching
http://eculture.cs.vu.nl/europeana/
Innovation - Annotation
Pundit @ DM2E project http://dm2e.eu
Advocating LOD http://vimeo.com/36752317
Conclusions
Big opportunities and challenges for Europeana and its partners
Not implementing the full Semantic Web technical stack at once already bring benefits
Seeing where the general Linked Data vision can change things
Useful links
Europeana portal europeana.eu
EuropeanaTech community pro.europeana.eu/europeana-tech
Europeana Data Model documentation pro.europeana.eu/edm-documentation
Europeana Twitter @EuropeanaEU
EuropeanaTech Twitter @EuropeanaTech
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