Data modeling at Europeana Antoine Isaac METS Workshop at the Digital Libraries 2014 Conference London, Sept. 11, 2014.

Data modeling at Europeana

Antoine Isaac

METS Workshop at the Digital Libraries 2014 Conference

London, Sept. 11, 2014

Access objects from 2,300 libraries, archives and museums

Currently33M objects

What Europeana gets (and makes available)

Descriptive metadata

Link to digital objects online

At the beginning flat DC-based records

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 persons, places…

Mixing data on real objects and digital content

Causing a lot of mapping quality problems

Creating a new Europeana Data Model: EDM

http://pro.europeana.eu/edm-documentation

Metadata interoperability challenges

Needs:

• Accommodate different data models

• Accommodate domain specific requirements

• Avoid losing data and keep the best granularity

• Co-exist with the original data

EDM rationale: requirements

Richer metadata - finer granularity

1. Distinguish “provided objects” (painting, book, movie, etc.) from their digital representations

2. Distinguish object from its metadata record

3. Allow multiple records for a same object, containing potentially contradictory statements about it

4. Support for objects that are composed of other objects

5. Support for contextual resources, including concepts from controlled vocabularies

EDM: an example

http://europeana.eu/portal/record/09102/_CM_0161930.html

More granular metadata

Digital representations of the object

One or more WebResources are provided for the cultural heritage object.

Properties:

dc:rights

edm:rightsdc:formatdc:descriptiondcterms:isPartOfedm:isNextInSequence…

Web Resource example

Aggregations organize data of a provider

• The Aggregation represents the set of related resources about one real object contributed by one provider.

• It carries the metadata that is about the whole set

• Europeana-specific properties

edm:dataProvider, edm:provider

edm:isShownBy, edm:isShownAt

edm:hasView

edm:rights

edm:ugc

Aggregation example

Contextual Resources – Places

Linked Open Data

Hierarchical objects in EDM

Hierarchical objects in EDM

Complete version at:http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/europeana/browse/list_resource?r=http://purl.org/collections/apenet/proxy-4_VTH-ATLASSEN_EN_KAARTBOEKEN-F&raw=true

Collaborative, soft standardization

Cross-community development, involving library, archive and museum experts and academic partners

Data model that re-uses several existing models

Semantic Web paradigm just allows mixing them!

(Future work:) Different semantic grains

Adopts Semantic Web principle of specializing classes and properties

Enables extensions, “applications profiles”, based on needs and best practices from specific sectors or domains

For now Europeana core ingestion still relies on an XML schema (for RDF data!)

METS – EDM mappings

DPLA

DDB

DM2E

EuropeanaConnect

APEx

Judaica

Most are METS/MODS

METS – EDM mappings

Focusing on MODS for the descriptive MD

• 1Mb METS may result in 3Kb EDM

METS structMap can populate the Aggregation of WebResources

• Media links and technical MD

Or hierarchies of ProvidedCHOs when the map refers to objects that have cultural interest by themselves

• E.g. multi-volume works, but not pages of books

Difference between Europeana and other projects wrt. choices for EDM ProvidedCHO

Conclusions

Exchanging data about aggregation of cultural objects, media files, with technical and descriptive MD

• Mapping from METS is possible

Linked data is really interesting in a network/community environment (Europeana & partners)

Implementing only a part of the Linked Data technical stack already bring benefits

An ongoing effort

Thank you

Antoine Isaac

[email protected]

@EuropeanaTech

Useful links

Europeana portal europeana.eu

EuropeanaTech community pro.europeana.eu/europeana-tech

Europeana Data Model documentation pro.europeana.eu/edm-documentation

Europeana Twitter @EuropeanaEU

EuropeanaTech Twitter @EuropeanaTech

Ready for metadata enrichment

Europeana links objects to third-party sources

• GEMET, GeoNames, DBpedia

Europeana providers send richer metadata

Harvesting thesauri as linked data

Contextual resources – multilingual & semantic linked data for Concepts

<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:broader></skos:Concept>

Contextual resource benefits - Work in progress

Allows to present users with richer context

Boosts multilingual search

And multilingual display