Presentation for the Open Data Masterclass organized by Kennisland at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 9 Oct, 2012

1. Europeana and Linked Open Data
Antoine Isaac, Europeana
Open Data Masterclass, KB
9 October 2012

2. Making metadata work for Europeana
Building a search engine on top of metadata is difficult
Traditional metadata quality problems: correctness, coverage
Especially when data is so heterogeneous
100s of formats, multilingual data
We currently use a simple flat interoperability format
(ESE)

3. More semantics-enabled services
Enhance access by semantics
Query expansion, clustering of results
Exploiting various relations: "located in", “more specific concept"…
Goal: to make richer data and services available to us and
others
Semantics are already there, in original metadata
Thesauri, classifications…
ESE loses information

4. Building a "semantic layer” context

5. Linked Data principles
1. Use URIs as names for things
2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names
3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful
information using standards (RDF, SPARQL)
4. Include links to other URIs, so that they can discover
more things
Tim Berners-Lee
http://linkeddata.org/

6. Example
http://data.europeana.eu/proxy/europeana/92037/25F9104787
668C4B5148BE8E5AB8DBEF5BE5FE03

7. Leading to HTML page for humans

8. Leading to data for software agents

9. Also contextual resources

10. Contextual resources lead to data too

11. Matches interest for linked data in
libraries, archives and museums
• Library Linked Data W3C Community Group
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/XGR-lld/
• LOD-LAM community
http://lod-lam.net
• IFLA Semantic Web group
http://www.ifla.org/en/swsig

12. LLD - General benefits of linked data
• Shareable
Globally unique resolvable identifiers – URI
• Extensible
"Open world" - no description is complete, anybody can add descriptive
information about the same thing
Annotations, enrichments, etc.
• Standard protocols/techniques vs. domain-specific ones
HTTP, RDF, REST
Etc.
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/XGR-lld/

13. Available Linked Library Data
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/XGR-lld-vocabdataset/

14. Available Library Linked Data
• Element sets/schemas/ontologies
SKOS, Dublin Core, OAI-ORE…
• Value vocabularies/thesauri/authority lists
LCSH, VIAF…
• Datasets
British Library, Chronicling America…

15. Europeana and Linked Data
Provide trusted, reference data for cultural objects
Promote the use of the technology
Promoting the exchange of data in the community and
with third parties: Open (meta)data!

16. Europeana and Linked Data
http://vimeo.com/36752317

18. Some steps in production services

19. Re-use and linking
Currently: GeoNames, GEMET…
Data re-use can be serendipitous!
From our domain (VIAF, UDC) or others (Eurovoc)
Multilingual resources are key for us

20. Europeana Data Model
• Representing objects & others: persons, places...
• Linking to internal or external data sources
• Separating original data from enrichments
• Enabling domain-specific data profiles
• Model re-uses existing vocabularies
http://pro.europeana.eu/edm-documentation

21. What is submitted to Europeana?
1. Thumbnails
2. Metadata
3. Links to digital objects online

22. Exemple
22

23. EDM data digital representation
DMF creator
DMF aggregation
The “real” painting
Europeana
aggregation
“enriched”
digital representation metadata

24. data.europeana.eu
Europeana Linked Open Data Pilot
• Fully open metadata
• 2.4 M objects
• 200 individual providers
• 15 countries

25. data.europeana.eu
September 2012
• Europeana new Data Exchange Agreement apply
• Entire metadata is CC0
• Provided as dump files

26. Thank you
Antoine Isaac
aisaac@few.vu.nl