use of semantic technologies for publishing and re-using cultural and scientific heritage data

Use of semantic technologies for publishing and re-using cultural and scientific heritage

data

Antoine IsaacSEMIC conferenceJune 18 2012, Brussels

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Europeana facts

23.5 million objects

more than 2.200 institutions

33 countries

“Single, direct and multilingual access point to the European cultural heritage.”

European Parliament, 27 September 2007

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Who submits data to Europeana?

APEnet

Archives

Libraries

Museums

National Aggregators

Regional Aggregators

Horizontal Aggregators Vertical Aggregators

The European Library

ATHENA

European Film Gateway

Film archivesELocal

GLAMs

Flanders museums

Culture Grid

GLAMs

Dark Aggregators

GLAMs

What is submitted to Europeana?

1. Thumbnails

2. Metadata

3. Links to digital objects online

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Building a search engine on top of metadata is difficultTraditional metadata quality problems: correctness, coverage

Especially when data is so heterogeneous100s of formats, multilingual data

We currently use a simple flat interoperability format (ESE)

Making metadata work for Europeana

More semantics-enabled services

Enhance access by semanticsQuery expansion, clustering of resultsExploiting various relations: "located in", “more specific concept"…

Goal: to make richer data and services available to us and others

Semantics are already there, in original metadataThesauri, classifications…ESE loses information

Building a "semantic layer” context

Matches interest for linked data in libraries, archives and museums

LOD-LAM

Available Linked Library Data

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/XGR-lld-vocabdataset/

Available Library Linked Data

• Element sets/schemas/ontologiesSKOS, Dublin Core, OAI-ORE…

• Value vocabularies/thesauri/authority listsLCSH, VIAF…

• DatasetsBritish Library, Chronicling America…

Europeana and Linked Data

Provide trusted, reference data for cultural objects

Promote the use of the technology

Promoting the exchange of data in the community and with third parties: Open (meta)data!

http://vimeo.com/36752317

Europeana and Linked Data

Some steps in production services

Re-use and linking

Currently: GeoNames, GEMET…

Data re-use can be serendipitous!From our domain (VIAF, UDC) or others (Eurovoc)

Multilingual resources are key for us

Europeana Data Model

• Representing objects & others: persons, places... • Linking to internal or external data sources• Separating original data from enrichments• Enabling domain-specific data profiles• Model re-uses existing vocabularies

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

data.europeana.eu

Europeana Linked Open Data Pilot

• Fully open metadata• 2.4 M objects• 200 individual providers• 15 countries

Challenges of semantic technology

Really big impact on processes IF you wish so

Requires a lot of education/evangelisation

More complex data modeling is an artfinding the right balance & linking to requirements

Linking datasets remain difficultneeds tooling, involvement of stakeholders

Ongoing work

EDM implementation in Data harvesting Search, browse etc. Data publishing interfaces

Search API, Linked Open Data, data dumps, OAI-PMH…

Metadata enrichment

Summary: benefits of semantic technologies for Europeana

Vocabularies and datasets to re-use

Flexible approach to building & re-using standards

More flexible approach to interoperabilitycustom vocabularies co-existing with standard ones

No constraints on the granularity of the data model

Technical ease of connecting and publishing data

Vision relates to open data strategies

Contribution to data modeling and exchangeCore vocabularies give good hints on what is needed

Source of data for re-use

Helping our data to be re-usedADMS

ISA?

Thank you

Antoine Isaac

aisaac@few.vu.nl