Presentation at VOGIN-IP-lezing 2014, 20 March 2014, http://vogin-ip-lezing.net/vogin-ip-lezing-2014/

1. Semantic Web, Linked Data:
the Europeana case(s)
Antoine Isaac
Europeana
Vogin-ip-lezing, March 20, 2014

2. Europeana.eu, Europe’s cultural heritage portal
Text
Image
Video
Sound
3D
30M objects from 2,200 galleries, museums, archives and libraries

3. 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

4. A distribution channel

5. What Europeana gets (and makes available)
Descriptive
metadata
Link to digital
objects online

6. Making metadata work better
 Creating a new Europeana Data Model
http://pro.europeana.eu/edm-documentation

7. 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

8. EDM: an example

9. More granular metadata

10. Harvesting thesauri as linked data

11. 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>

12. Contextual Resources – Places

13. 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

14. 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

15. Ready for metadata enrichment
 Already re-using third-party sources
• GEMET, GeoNames, DBpedia
 Enrichment by providers or Europeana
• In collaboration!
• Example: Getty vocabularies
http://www.getty.edu/research/tools
/vocabularies/lod/

16. Facilitating re-use

17. 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

18. 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

19. Benefiting from existing R&D efforts
EuropeanaTech
community
pro.europeana.eu/europeana-tech

20. Innovation - Searching
http://eculture.cs.vu.nl/europeana/

21. Innovation - Annotation
Pundit @ DM2E project http://dm2e.eu

22. Advocating LOD http://vimeo.com/36752317

23. 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

24. Thank you
#AllezCulture !
Antoine Isaac
antoine.isaac@europeana.eu
@EuropeanaTech

25. 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