Semantic Web, Linked Data:the Europeana case(s)

Antoine IsaacR&D Manager, Europeana

NISO/NFAIS Virtual Conference: Semantic Web: What's New and CoolDecember 2, 2015

What is Europeana?

Europe’s platform to access cultural heritage

Currently48M objects

What Europeana makes available

Metadata

What Europeana makes available

Metadata

Link to digital objects online

Built on descriptive metadatafrom a broad, heterogeneous network

Audiovisual collections

National Aggregators

Regional AggregatorsArchives

Thematic collections

Libraries

Musées Lausannois

Culture.frThe European Library

APEX

European Film Gateway Europeana Fashion

Over 2K galleries, museums, archives and libraries

Representing and enriching data with Semantic Web technology

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

EDM: an example

More granular metadata

Harvesting thesauri as linked data

Contextual Resources – Places

Create a “semantic layer” on top of cultural heritage objects

From: Stefan Gradmann

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/

Not just AATOur partner projects use other linked data sets

Geonames, VIAF, GND, Iconclass, DBpedia, MIMO, PartagePlus

Vocabularies currently provided to Europeana

Europeana Automatic Enrichment

Europeana Automatic Enrichment

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

Other side effects

Modeling, linked data style

Cross-community development

Data models that re-use several existing modelsSemantic Web paradigm just allows mixing them!

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

Europeana Metadata

Encourages Open Metadata

CC

End-user services

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:

Searching (2)

Browsing

Europeana Channels

Annotating

Pundit @ DM2E project http://dm2e.eu

data.europeana.eu

Alongside other data publication channels

Portal

API

OAI-PMH

….

Advocating LOD

http://vimeo.com/36752317

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

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

Thank youAntoine Isaac

antoine.isaac@europeana.eu