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Metadata Aggregation via Linked Data: Results of the Europeana Common Culture Project

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Metadata and Semantic Research (MTSR 2020)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1355))

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Abstract

Digital cultural heritage resources are widely available on the web through the digital libraries of heritage institutions. To address the difficulties of discoverability in cultural heritage, the common practice is metadata aggregation, where centralized efforts like Europeana facilitate discoverability by collecting the resources’ metadata. We present the results of the linked data aggregation task conducted within the Europeana Common Culture project, which attempted an innovative approach to aggregation based on linked data made available by cultural heritage institutions. This task ran for one year with participation of twelve organizations, involving the three member roles of the Europeana network: data providers, intermediary aggregators, and the central aggregation hub, Europeana. We report on the challenges that were faced by data providers, the standards and specifications applied, and the resulting aggregated metadata.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For more information about the role of Schema.org for structured data on the web, please consult: https://schema.org/docs/about.html.

  2. 2.

    For information about the Europeana Common Culture project, consult https://pro.europeana.eu/project/europeana-common-culture.

  3. 3.

    In fact, the related LD work here has not changed since our earlier papers.

  4. 4.

    The maximum depth is a parameter of crawlers that defines when they should stop following newly found links, based on distance from the resource where the crawl started.

  5. 5.

    For details consult the section ‘EDM XML Schema and EDM validation in Oxygen’ at https://pro.europeana.eu/page/edm-documentation.

  6. 6.

    The GitHub repository of the software resulting from this task: https://github.com/netwerk-digitaal-erfgoed/lod-aggregator.

  7. 7.

    The data providers of the LD aggregation task were the following: erfgoedplus.be (Belgium), National Library of Finland, German Digital Library, National Documentation Centre (Greece), DigiPhil (Hungary), CulturaItalia (Italy), National Library of Latvia, National Library of Portugal, National Library of the Netherlands, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (The Netherlands), UMA information technology gmbh (Austria), Swedish National Heritage Board.

  8. 8.

    The LD published by the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen is not 100% valid according to the Europeana requirements, conversion into valid EDM was achieved by using the Mapping Server of our LD toolset.

  9. 9.

    The LD published by the Swedish National Heritage Board is publish KSAMSÖK ontology. For the purposes of the pilot, it served as a test for the capabilities of the Mapper Service component to function with other different ontologies. A mapping from KSAMSÖK to EDM was available and it was reimplemented with SPARQL construct queries for execution by the Mapper Service.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the support given by the participants of the pilot: Helena Patrício, Tetiana Kysla, Minna Rönkä, Osma Suominen, Haris Georgiadis, Agathi Papanoti, and Palko Gabor, as well as Erwin Verbruggen for his coordination. We also would like to acknowledge Adina Ciocoiu from the Europeana Foundation for the analysis of data samples collected during the case study.

This work was partially supported by Portuguese national funds through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) with reference UIDB/50021/2020, the European Commission under contract 30-CE-0885387/00-80, and grant agreement INEA/CEF/ICT/A2018/1633581 and by the NDE-program funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal

    Nuno Freire

  2. Dutch Digital Heritage Network, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Enno Meijers & Sjors de Valk

  3. HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Haute école de gestion de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland

    Julien A. Raemy

  4. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Julien A. Raemy

  5. Europeana Foundation, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Antoine Isaac

  6. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Antoine Isaac

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  1. Nuno Freire
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  2. Enno Meijers
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  3. Sjors de Valk
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  4. Julien A. Raemy
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  5. Antoine Isaac
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nuno Freire .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. International Hellenic University, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Emmanouel Garoufallou

  2. Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    María-Antonia Ovalle-Perandones

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Freire, N., Meijers, E., de Valk, S., Raemy, J.A., Isaac, A. (2021). Metadata Aggregation via Linked Data: Results of the Europeana Common Culture Project. In: Garoufallou, E., Ovalle-Perandones, MA. (eds) Metadata and Semantic Research. MTSR 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1355. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71903-6_35

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71903-6_35

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