Article presented at the EVA Florence Conference: http://www.evaflorence.it/home.php (21-23.4.2010) Judaica Europeana: Semantic Web tools for expressing the contribution of Jews to European Cities in the European Digital Library – Europeana – Dov Winer

1. Judaica Europeana: Semantic Web tools
for expressing Jewish contribution to
European Cities in Europeana
EVA Florence, April 2010
www.judaica-europeana.eu
Dov Winer
European Association for Jewish Culture
Scientific Manager, Judaica Europeana

2. Europeana ― the vision
Europe’s digital libraries, “A digital library that is a single,
archives and museums direct and multilingual access point
online to the European cultural heritage.”
European Parliament, 27 September 2007
• A showcase for Europe’s “A unique resource for Europe's
cultural and scientific distributed cultural heritage …
heritage ensuring a common access to
• A flagship project of the Europe's libraries, archives and
museums.”
European Commission and
Horst Forster, Director, Digital Content &
the European Parliament. Cognitive Systems Information Society
Directorate, European Commission

3. Europeana - A vision for 2011
• “A common multilingual access point aggregator, distributor and
facilitator that would make it possible to catalyse and search
innovate and generate revenue from Europe’s distributed – that is
to say, held in different places by different organisations – digital
cultural heritage online. “
European Union Communiqué August 2010
European Union Communiqué August 2010
Aggregator Distributor
Catalyst Innovator
Facilitator Revenue generator
Innovator
Facilitator

4. Europeana Group of Projects
Biodiversity Heritage
Libraries Europe
Presto
Judaica Europeana Arrow
Prime
Europeana Local
Europeana v.1.0
Musical Inst. European
Museums Film
Europeana Gateway
Online
Europeana EuropeanaConnect
EUScreen
Travel
APEnet Athena
The European Library

5. Judaica Europeana
documents the Jewish contribution to Europe’s cultural
heritage on the theme of cities

6. Judaica Europeana
• Reply to the eContentPlus 2008 call for contributions to EUROPEANA –
The European Digital Library
• 24 months project - 3 million € with 50% contribution of the European
Commission
• Contribution of content on the Europeana theme of CITY:
cities of the future/past - migration and diasporas - trade and industry -
design, shopping and urban cool - the route to urban health - archaeology
and architecture - utopias - riot and disorder - palaces and politics
• Other themes in the Call:
Social life - Music - Crime and Punishment - Travel & tourism

7. Partners
Coordinator
Hungarian Jewish Archive

8. Extending the network
The following expressed their interest in
joining Judaica Europeana:
• National Library of Israel, Jerusalem
• Center for Jewish History, New York
• Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam
• Jewish Museum Berlin
• Galicia Jewish Museum, Krakow
• London Metropolitan Archive
• Aberdeen University Library
• Institute for Jewish Policy Research,
London
Travelling trunk brought by a German refugee
family to England in May 1939, Mädler Koffer,
c.1930, Germany. The Jewish Museum London

9. JUDAICA Europeana goals
• Document Jewish expression in Europe. Support content holders in
identifying content that reflect the Jewish impact on European cities
• Digitise and aggregate this content. Synchronize standards, metadata
and vocabularies, with Europeana interoperability requirements
• Deploy knowledge management tools to support communities of
practice index, retrieve and re-use content pertinent to their areas of
interest
• Support employment of content in scholarship; university teaching;
museum curatorship; cultural tourism; plastic arts, music and
multimedia; formal and informal education

10. Jewish contribution to European cities
Urbanisation and occupational
specialisation has led to the
identification of Jews with
specific streets, neighbourhoods
and other urban phenomena.
The J-Street Project by Susan Heller.
Compton Verney Trust and the DAAD, Berlin,
2005. A book, installation and video produced
with the support of the European Association
for Jewish Culture.

11. Jews in European Cities – kinds of content
Known celebrities – full individual expression
Jewish expressions in the
urban landscape
Core of Jewish Life

12. Jews in European Cities

13. Jews and the City
Prof. Steven Zipperstein points to the anti-urban bias of most of the
Jewish historiography and how this began to change at the end of the
20th Century
Zipperstein, S. (1987). Jewish Historiography and the Modern City. Jewish History V2 , pp.77-88
“The Jewish Century” by Yuri Slezkine (2004):
“Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate,
intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is
about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields and herds. It
is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of
wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake. It is about
transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing
inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling social estates for
the benefit of individuals, nuclear families, and book-reading tribes (nations).
Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.”
(Slezkine, 2004).
• Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. For the first chapter
see http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7819.html
“

14. Digitise, aggregate, metadata & vocabularies
• EUROPEANA will be integral part of the Web of Knowledge
• Linked Data – the RDF Web, Web as a database
• Building units: URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers)
in RDF (Resource Description Framework) triplets:
Subject, Predicate, Object
• Vocabularies as Hubs in the Web of Knowledge:
SKOS – Simple Knowledge Organisation System

16. The Web of Data
• “First,
the Web will get better and better at helping us to
manage, integrate, and analyze data.”
• “Today, the Web is quite effective at helping us to publish
and discover documents, but the individual information
elements within those documents ... cannot be handled
directly as data.”

17. The Web of Data
• “Today you can see the data with your browser, but can't
get other computer programs to manipulate or analyze it
without going through a lot of manual effort yourself.”
• “As this problem is solved, we can expect that Web as a
whole to look more like a large database or spreadsheet,
rather than just a set of linked documents.”

18. The Web of Data
Those data can be published in the Web...
...linked with other data in the Web...
...shared between software applications...

19. http://linkeddata.org/

21. The Web of Knowledge
• Publish KOS (Knowledge Organisation Systems) as
linked data in the Web
– Make their concepts and their interconnections part of
the Web of data
• Why?
• How? (SKOS...)

22. KOS e.g. LCSH (Library of Congress Subject Headings)
• Can be viewed as a network of interconnected
concepts
• Represent LCSH as data in the Web
– Make those concepts and their interconnections part of
the Web
22 http://purl
.org/net/a
liman

23. SKOS Resource Types (Classes)
• skos:Concept
– E.g. LCSH concept of US Presidents
• skos:ConceptScheme
– E.g. LCSH itself

24. SKOS Link Types (Properties)
• For labeling concepts
– skos:prefLabel, skos:altLabel, skos:hiddenLabel
• For documenting concepts
– skos:note, skos:scopeNote, skos:definition,
skos:editorialNote...
• For linking concepts
– skos:broader, skos:narrower, skos:related

25. SKOS Simple Knowledge ORGANIZATION SYSTEM
thesauri, classifications, subjects, taxonomies, folksonomies,…
controlled vocabulary
concepts are documented, linked, merged with other data, composed, integrated
and published on the Web
CONCEPTS identified by URIs using RDF triples
:natural language expressions to refer to
concepts
skos: prefLabel [descriptor]
skos: altLabel [synonims, acronyms, abbreviations]
SEMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS
…broader and narrower concepts
broader/narrower relationships assert that a concept
is broader/narrower in meaning
related…concepts somehow related
SCHEMES compiled sets of concepts: ConceptScheme class and inScheme
relationship to link a concept to a scheme
hasTopConcept relationship for the entry points of narrower/broader hierarchy
LINK schemes map concepts from different schemes using the properties
exactMatch, broadMatch, narrowMatch and relatedMatch
June 10
dov.winer@gmail.com

27. SKOS APPLICATIONS
I want to send my thesaurus/subject heading/taxonomy from one
database/application to another
I want to publish my thesaurus/taxonomy… in an “electronic” form, so
that it can become part of a distributed information
network/environment
The Web values quality and openness (e.g. Wikipedia)
KOS are high quality resources [both the concepts and the links]
KOS are natural hubs…attractors…high gravity…attract links
act as firm foundation for a Web of data…
Links are paths to discovery (of documents, data,…); they can be
exploited in useful and surprising ways (serendipity); well
established KOS e.g. LCSH (Library of Congress Subject Headings,
MeSH (Medical Subject Headings, AAT (Art and Architecture
Thesaurus) can be hubs in the Web of linked data June 10
dov.winer@gmail.com

32. Jewish gazetteers

33. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/search/

34. The benefits Judaica Europeana will bring
• Europeana will expose content providers metadata to search
engines, making deep web content accessible.
• Europeana will soon be able to provide a set of APIs (application
programming interfaces) through which the content of Europeana may
be re-used by Europeana partners and integrated for display in their own
online platforms.
• Knowledge transfer: Europeana works with digital library experts from
across Europe and America. They are leading thinkers and practitioners
in the fields of metadata standards, multilinguality, semantic web,
information architecture, usability, geolocation, object modelling and other
topics.

35. Deploy Knowledge Management Tools

36. Deploy Knowledge Management Tools
• European Science Foundation
COST A32 Action
Open Scholarly Communities in the Web

37. Employment of Content
• Support employment of content in scholarship; university
teaching; museum curatorship; cultural tourism; plastic arts,
music and multimedia; formal and informal education
• Each partner will:
• Organize at least two virtual exhibitions employing the digitised
resources
• Involve at least two scholars in using Judaica Europeana
knowledge management tools
• Involve at leas two university level courses in using Judaica
Europeana resources for teaching
• Engage at least three schools in the Unesco project “Scenes and
Sounds of my City”

38. Thank you for your attention!
Contact:
Dov Winer
Judaica Europeana Scientific Manager
EAJC - European Association for Jewish Culture
dov.winer@gmail.com