1. Interoperability Aspects in Europeana Antoine Isaac aisaac@few.vu.nl Workshop on Research Metadata in Context 7./8. September 2010, Nijmegen

2. europeana.eu: the mission Making European cultural heritage better (web-)accessible Federating (online) cultural collections across countries and domains Hundreds of institutions, millions of objects

3. europeana.eu in practice We rely on aggregating from our providers: Metadata References to digital objects We have a portal End-user “show-case” We will strive to become a metadata distributor Allowing partners to get enriched (contextualized) data for their objects Allowing third-parties to deploy object access functions similar to Europeana’s, in their own services

4. Current status – provider data Very heterogeneous: different communities, different institutions, different interests and means Descriptions of original objects and digital objects uses hundreds of vocabularies, e.g.: Libraries: “MARC-style” records Museums: very diverse, richest ones with event-based descriptions (CIDOC-CRM) Archives: “EAD-style” hierarchical finding aids Cross-field “container” formats: METS

5. Current status – provider data Grain varies Quality varies Free keyword indexing Explicit or implicit use of controlled vocabularies Adhoc vs. more standard (DDC, AAT, etc.) Persistent identifier usage not widespread (National) Libraries are doing better

6. Current Europeana metadata stream Europeana Semantic Elements for ingestion of descriptive metadata and pointers to digital objects Dublin Core fields + Europeana-specific one Providers do the mapping from their data to ESE Ingestion process: OAI-PMH, still often via files (Fielded) full-text search using SOLR/Lucene

7. Limitations of ESE Simple “flat” format Loosing richer (structured) data OK for full-text indexing and search Not ok for all the rest (display, access to data, richer search) Variations of DC field usage across collections dc:coverage dc:rights

8. Digression: talk about rights? Lots of objects, with rights not cleaned yet Collection-level approaches are difficult to implement Rights of metadata different of rights for “real” objects Result: users don’t know in Europeana the rights status of the object they can access They have to go to providers’ site for each object Deterring reference and re-use Recent developments: trying to Encourage provision of rights at object-level Use “controlled vocabularies” for rights (CC) Promote public domain (esp. for metadata)

9. The future A new data model as a solution? EDM – Europeana Data Model

10. EDM requirements & principles 1. Distinction between “provided object” (painting, book, program) and digital representation 2. Distinction between object and metadata record describing an object 3. Allow for multiple records for same object, containing potentially contradictory statements about an object 4. Support for objects that are composed of other objects 5. Standard metadata format that can be specialized 6. Standard vocabulary format that can be specialized 7. EDM should be based on existing standards

11. EDM basics Re-using available vocabularies OAI ORE for organization of metadata about an object Dublin Core for core metadata representation SKOS for vocabulary representation

12. EDM basics A semantic web-inspired model E.g., DC would not be used with text fields alone, reference to controlled vocabularies (via URIs) will be encouraged Keeping original descriptive metadata Achieving interoperability through mapping (cf. Peter’s “profile matching”?) Flexibility–ingesting richer original metadata– is a main requirement Even though we might not really use ourselves all of the data at its full potential, e.g. for search

13. A flexible model: different semantic grains

14. A flexible model: object and events

15. Around the data model Opportunity (and need) to get and produce richer metadata De-duplication Semantic enrichment with contextual resources (thesauri, authority lists) within and outside Europeana Alignment of contextual resources Linked Data: serving data on the web, pointing to others’ data Fits very well Europeana missions

16. Around the data model Rationalization of data ingestion, archival and dissemination process (OAIS) makes more explicit what Europeana needs to do to behave more as a real metadata archive Not only feeding a Lucene/SOLR instance Cope with enrichments, versions, pointers to external resources Registries of vocabularies (metadata structures and controlled value vocabularies) and links between them

17. Encouraging community initiatives Best practices for representing and providing metadata can be seen as a complement to the general EDM. Building interoperability cores at community-level Museums: ATHENA project (LIDO format) Audio/visual: PrestoPrime, European Film Gateway Archives: APEnet (using EAD)

18. Planning

19. Thank you! References for ESE and EDM: http://version1.europeana.eu/web/guest/technical-requirements/ http://version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-project/technicaldocuments/

20. Mona Lisa example 20

21. Example with event-based metadata