E-Space technical infrastructure taking shape

On a very sunny 29th of May in Florence,  hosted in the wonderful premises of partner FST Fondazione Sistema Toscana, an interesting workshop of Europeana Space took place to discuss further the technical infrastructure developed by partner NTUA and already presented during the preceding public technical workshop realized in Brussels in cooperation with Europeana Foundation.

The Florence appointment was instead reserved to the partners of Europeana Space;  after the opening of the day by the technical coordinator Antonella Fresa (Promoter), Eirini Kaldeli and Arne Stabenau (NTUA) widely illustrated the WITH technical infrastructure on which the Technical Space and the Content Space of Europeana Space are based.

E-Space WITH is an innovative concept for an infrastructure, which exposes APIs from different portals and repositories. It allows the user to search content of interest from a single access point into different and disjointed repositories and databases such as Europeana, the DPLA Digital Public Library of America, YouTube.. and of course the Europeana Space own repository, currently under construction.

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The content is called via APIs, and the WITH infrastructure isn't duplicating existing tools, while it instead shows innovative features, to leverage on for the development of services of E-Space:

1. MANAGEMENT OF CONTENT: the infrastructure permits to safely access and use both open content available on line (searching different repositories from a single access point) and non-open/not yet cleared content via the Europeana Space Protected Space


2. MANAGEMENT OF COLLECTIONS: the infrastructure permits to create and to give access to collections of curated content, to be “marked” and shared with other users or potential users.

The Technical Space and the Content Space developed by the project will therefore complement and feed the Innovation Space, an environment for endorsing and incubating new business based on digital cultural content.

The first instance of E-Space WITH is planned to be running on the server, including first version of the APIs and minimum functionalities, by mid of June. The first stable version will be then available in September and the official launch of the platform is foreseen in the mid-term conference of Europeana Space to take place in December 2015 in Tallin.

Photos courtesy of Fred Truyen