This document discusses Europeana's use of semantic web technologies and linked data to improve access to cultural heritage collections. It summarizes that Europeana aggregates metadata from various cultural institutions to provide access to over 48 million digitized objects. It has implemented the Europeana Data Model to represent metadata in a more granular, semantically linked way using vocabularies like GeoNames, DBpedia, and AAT. This has enabled automatic enrichment of metadata as well as multilingual and conceptual searching. Linked open data approaches provide technical and strategic benefits to Europeana by facilitating data sharing and enrichment across domains.

1. Semantic Web, Linked Data:
the Europeana case(s)
Antoine Isaac
R&D Manager, Europeana
NISO/NFAIS Virtual Conference: Semantic Web: What's New and Cool
December 2, 2015

2. What is
Europeana?

3. Europe’s platform to access cultural heritage
Currently
48M objects

4. What Europeana makes available
Metadata

5. What Europeana makes available
Metadata
Link to digital
objects online

6. Built on descriptive metadata
from 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
Over 2K galleries, museums, archives and libraries

7. Representing and
enriching data with
Semantic Web
technology

8. Prior to the Europeana Data Model: flat
records in Europeana
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 context entities (persons, places)
 Mixing data on real object and digital content
 A lot of mapping quality problems

9. EDM: an example

10. More granular metadata

11. Harvesting thesauri as linked data

12. Contextual Resources – Places

13. Create a “semantic layer” on top of cultural
heritage objects
From: Stefan Gradmann

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

15. Not just AAT
Our partner projects use other linked data sets
Geonames, VIAF, GND, Iconclass, DBpedia, MIMO, PartagePlus

16. Vocabularies currently provided to Europeana

17. Europeana Automatic Enrichment

18. Europeana Automatic Enrichment

19. It's not easy
Enrichment
Type
Target
vocabulary
Source metadata
fields
Number of
enriched
objects
Places GeoNames dcterms:spatial,
dc:coverage
7M
Concepts GEMET,
DBpedia,
dc:subject,
dc:type
9.2M
Agents DBpedia dc:creator,
dc:contributor
144K
Time Semium Time dc:date,
dc:coverage,
dcterms:temporal,
edm:year
10,2M

20. Other side effects

21. Modeling, linked data style
 Cross-community development
 Data models that re-use several existing models
Semantic Web paradigm just allows mixing them!

22. Different semantic grains
 Semantic Web principle of specializing
classes and properties
 Enables extensions, “applications
profiles”, based on needs and best
practices from specific sectors or
domains

23. Europeana Metadata
Encourages Open Metadata
CC

24. End-user services

25. Searching (1)
<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:prefLabel>Harpsichords</skos:prefLabel>
</skos:Concept>
</skos:broader>
</skos:Concept>
This is actually super useful for multilingual search:

26. Searching (2)

27. Browsing
Europeana Channels

28. Annotating
Pundit @ DM2E project http://dm2e.eu

29. data.europeana.eu

30. Alongside other data publication
channels
Portal
API
OAI-PMH
….

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

32. Benefits of linked data for Europeana
 Vision matches well open data strategies
 Vocabularies and datasets to re-use for enrichment
 Making data work better for search and display
 Technical ease of publishing and connecting data
 Flexible approach to building & re-using standards

33. Lessons learnt
 There are opportunities and challenges
 For Europeana and its partners
 Not implementing the full Semantic Web technical
stack at once already bring benefits
 Requires to precisely identify where the Linked Data
vision can change things

34. Thank you
Antoine Isaac
antoine.isaac@europeana.eu