Slides presented at the Workshop "Semantic Services in EOSC", in January 2018.

1. THE EUROPEANA COMMUNITY
SEMANTICS AND CULTURAL HERITAGE DATA
Nuno Freire, INESC-ID / Europeana Foundation
Workshop “Semantic services in EOSC”
Porto, January 2018

2. Outline
CC BY-SA
• About Europeana
• Europeana Data Model
• Europeana‘s entity collection
• Semantic annotations
• For future work:
e-Infrastructure Semantic Services for Cultural
Heritage

3. About Europeana
CC BY-SA
We aggregate metadata:
• From all EU countries
• ~3,700 galleries, libraries, archives and museums
• More than 54M objects
• In about 50 languages
• … contains references to places, agents, concepts, time
We aggregate content:
• … but not yet our core activity
• The main aggregation of content is a full-text corpus of Historical
Newspapers
The Platform for Europe’s Digital Cultural Heritage

4. About Europeana
CC BY-SA
• Provides a portal for users to access metadata and digital objects
• http://www.europeana.eu/
• Metadata under Creative Commons Zero - public domain
• Links to source organization
• Digital objects access
• Embedded access
• Previews (when embedded access is technically not possible)
• Data distributed via APIs:
• Linked Data
• SPARQL
• OAI-PMH
• Search and other REST APIs
• More information on APIs at https://pro.europeana.eu/resources/apis

5. Europeana Data Model (EDM)
CC BY-SA
• The design of the model is RDF based
• XML serialization is also available
• Cross-community re-use of data models
• Models that re-use existing models
• Semantic Web technology allows mixing
them!
• Offers the framework for linking data
• Collaborative, softer form of standardization

6. EDM: connecting all the cultural
domains and languages
CC BY-SA
• Create a “semantic layer” on top of cultural heritage objects

7. Europeana Linked Data Strategy
Our efforts and lines of work
CC BY-SA
• We apply automatic enrichment to link source data to
reference data
• We encourage data providers to contribute their own
vocabularies so that we can benefit from data links made at
data providers’ level
• We encourage alignment activities between domain
vocabularies

8. Europeana Linked Data Strategy
A strategy for Entities
CC BY-SA
• As a cornerstone for our strategy we are building an
"Entity Collection"
• A service that acts as a centralized point of reference and
access to data about contextual entities
• Caching and curating data from the wider Linked Open Data
cloud
• … to manage the semantic used in descriptions of
Cultural Heritage and enable end-user requirements
• Research
• Education
• Etc.

9. The Entity Collection
How do we choose our target vocabularies?
CC BY-SA
As defined in the recent Europeana Tech Task Force on enrichment
and evaluation:
• Properly documented and supported by a community
• Technically available on the web according to the Linked Data best
practices and recipes
• Available under an open licence
• Multilingual
• Abide to a minimal ontological commitment principle
• Apply the best practices and standards for the representation, structure
and description of vocabularies
• Well-connected internally and externally to other vocabularies (preferably
spine vocabularies)

10. Europeana and semantic annotations
CC BY-SA
We adopted the W3C Web Annotation Data Model
• Offers a simple model for exchanging annotations across platforms
... but flexible enough to support complex scenarios
We provide a REST API based on the W3C Web Annotation
Protocol
• For retrieval, creation and search of annotations
https://pro.europeana.eu/resources/apis/annotations
… Aiming for exchanging annotations across platforms
within our network and with others (research, education, …)

11. CC BY-SA
For future work:
e-Infrastructure Semantic Services for
Cultural Heritage

12. • All three semantic services in development at EUDAT are
of interest for Europeana and cultural heritage institutions
• Use cases:
• Semantic annotations by end-users
• Curation of data using vocabularies by Europeana and its data
providers
• Virtual collection building, based on common vocabularies or
vocabularies sharing co-references and alignments
• Additional services extension of existing services:
• Annotation exchange service:
• Sharing of annotations made on the datasets of Europeana hosted at
e-Infrastructures
• Alignment of research vocabularies with cultural heritage vocabularies
• For supporting discovery of cultural heritage datasets in services such
as B2FIND
CC BY-SA
e-Infrastructure Semantic Services
for Europeana and Cultural Heritage Institutions
Workshop “Semantic Services in
EOSC”
contact: nuno.freire@europeana.eu

13. Netherlands, Public Domain
1660 - 1625, Rijksmuseum
Anonymous
Arrival of a Portuguese ship
Contacts:
Antoine Isaac
R&D Manager
antoine.isaac@europeana.eu
Hugo Manguinhas
APIs
hugo.manguinhas@europeana.eu
Nuno Freire, INESC-ID
Researcher
(Europeana‘s EUDAT Data Pilot contact)
nuno.freire@tecnico.ulisboa.pt