Europeana as a Linked Open Data case (in progress)

Antoine Isaac

ISKO UK Seminar “Making Metadata Work”

London, June 23, 2014

Europe’s platform to access cultural heritage

Currently33M objects

Built on descriptive metadatafrom 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

What Europeana gets (and makes available)

Descriptive metadata

Link to digital objects online

A distribution channel

Linked Open Data?

http://vimeo.com/36752317

Realizing Linked Data bits by bits

Incremental progress on Europeana’s various facets

Data ingestion

Data enrichment

Front-end services: search, display

Data publication

Making metadata work better

Creating a new Europeana Data Model: EDM

http://pro.europeana.eu/edm-documentation

Prior to EDM: flat metadata 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 between objects and persons, places…

Mixing data on real object and digital content

Causing a lot of mapping quality problems

EDM: an example

http://europeana.eu/portal/record/09102/_CM_0161930.html

More granular metadata

Contextual Resources – Places

Collaborative, soft standardization

Cross-community development, involving library, archive and museum experts and academic partners

Data model that re-uses several existing models

Semantic Web paradigm just allows mixing them!

(Future work:) 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

Europeana links objects to third-party sources

• GEMET, GeoNames, DBpedia

Europeana providers send richer 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 resource benefits - Work in progress

Allows to present users with richer context

Boosts multilingual search

And multilingual display

Linked-data compatible data re-use 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

Technological advocacy hand in hand with legal advocacy

http://vimeo.com/36752317

<slight digression>

On practical aspects of enhancing semantic interoperability using SKOS and KOS alignment

Antoine ISAAC

KRR lab, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

National Library of the Netherlands

ISKO UK Meeting, July 21 2008, London

Enhancing semantic interoperability using SKOS

Conclusion

• Representing KOSs using SKOS• Main features

• Practical issues

• Demo

• SKOS and semantic alignment of KOSs

Despite some issues, SKOS provides a crucial contribution to enhance interoperability of KOSs

SKOS and Linked Data

Antoine Isaac

ISKO, London, Sept. 14th 2010

Conclusion

Publication and linking of linked KOS data is still work in progress, but

• We are now in position of realizing the issues and working towards solving them

• We can start building applications that make use of the wealth of data already available or yet to comeMany KO resources to re-use and link to

Now: Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus in SKOS Linked Open Data!

http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/lod/

Now: Getty AAT in Europeana

http://europeana.eu/portal/record/2023004/24062A23_priref_229.html

Now: Getty AAT in Europeana

http://europeana.eu/portal/record/2023004/24062A23_priref_229.html

</slight digression>

Still many 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

Conclusions

Linked data presents big opportunities and challenges for Europeana and its partners

Not implementing the full technical stack at once already bring benefits

Thank you

#AllezCulture !

Antoine Isaac

antoine.isaac@europeana.eu

@EuropeanaTech

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