Digital meets Culture

A study conducted by TERENA in partnership with the Univ. of Amsterdam, LIBER and the Univ. of Debrecen

Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructures for Scientific Data in Europe

The final report from a European study that could pave the way to distributed and collaborative authentication, authorisation and accounting (AAA) for scientific data was published on 18 December 2012.

The AAA Study was carried out by a consortium composed of LIBER (The Association of European Research Libraries), University of Amsterdam (NL), University Debrecen (HU) and TERENA, which was the lead partner. This was the first time that TERENA and LIBER have worked together on such a project.

Managing the data glut

The rapid development and adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has changed the way researchers work, enabling almost instantaneous collaboration regardless of physical location, and has provided access to an enormous amount of scientific information that can be processed on powerful computational platforms. This new way of working generates a huge volume of data, whose exchange and curation pose significant challenges.

In 2010 the High-Level Expert Group on Scientific Data (known as HLEG on Scientific Data) published recommendations that an authentication and authorisation system should be set up by integrating existing AAA infrastructures in order to allow distributed and collaborative AAA for scientific data. To address this recommendation and to facilitate the emergence of a robust platform (Scientific Data Infrastructure (SDI)) for access to and preservation of scientific information, the European Commission funded the AAA Study, which began in December 2011. The study tender was also designed to be one step towards a Europe-wide single sign-on for all digital library and computing services for the research community.

“The improvement of access to and preservation of research publications and data, scientific collaborations and advanced infrastructures (e-infrastructures) are all important priorities for the European Commission,” explained Kostas Glinos, Head of e-Infrastructure Unit at DG CONNECT, European Commission. “Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructures (AAIs) play a crucial role in providing a distributed virtual environment where scientific resources can be stored, accessed and shared.”

The AAA Study evaluated the feasibility of delivering an integrated authentication and authorisation (and possibly accounting) infrastructure, by collecting use-cases from across different disciplines and evaluating existing infrastructures.

Key recommendations

The 60 page report resulting from the study contains a number of recommendations, which target different stakeholders: the European Commission to define a possible directive; Member States to create the conditions for such an infrastructure at national level; policy makers, particularly those involved in the Data Protection Directive, to take into account the impact of legislation on cross-boundary access management; and developers to use standard technologies to achieve interoperability.

The report highlights the following:

an AAI for SDI should be built on standard technologies, using infrastructures such as eduGAIN, eduroam and EUDAT, and mechanisms to translate between various authentication and authorisation technologies; and that federated access plays an important role;
to fully benefit from federated access, more funding is needed to improve the reach of national identity federations in research and education;
further research is needed to enhance authorisation and accounting mechanisms;
a common policy and trust framework for identity management is needed, as well as clarity on data protection laws – these should be coordinated at European level;
relevant organisations such as EGI.eu, e-IRG, EUDAT, ESFRI projects, IGTF, REFEDS (Research and Education Federations), the European Commission and consortia of libraries and data centres should all work towards these goals.

Further information

Download here the AAA Study report.

Further information about the AAA Study and recommendations is available via the AAA Study web page.

More information about TERENA is available at www.terena.org.

More about the Association of European Research Libraries is available on the LIBER website.

More about the High-Level Expert Group on Scientific Data report.

2nd EUDAT International Conference, 28-30 October 2013, Rome – Italy

All roads lead to Rome

The EUDAT project has, since its inception in 2011, always explored ways to build generic technical services that support multiple research communities. EUDAT works closely with a wide range of communities to deliver these technical services as part of the EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI). To be successful in this ambitious initiative, EUDAT is using novel methods to involve all the stakeholders, both in the discussions to determine the required services, and in the process of designing, developing and implementing those services.

The annual conference, 28-30 October 2013, Rome – Italy, is one of these many ways that EUDAT engages actively and directly with stakeholders. Through plenary sessions, parallel tracks, training courses and associated workshops participants are offered a 360° view of EUDAT existing and future services and how they will benefit both researchers and research organisations in accessing and preserving their research data.

To concretely illustrate how EUDAT collaborates closely with and directly involves other initiatives with a similar vision and an overarching goal of facilitating access to preservation of research data, a series of associated workshops will take place on Monday 28^th & Wednesday 30^th October covering from biodiversity, to Social Sciences and Humanities, to cultural heritage from research data. See the complete list at http://www.eudat.eu/eudat-2nd-conference-workshops

The parallel tracks of the conference are dedicated to showcasing both the existing and new EUDAT services which are seen as priorities for research communities and address core functional requirements of the EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI). Together with presentations, demos and training on Safe Replication, the Data Staging, the Metadata and Simple Store services, new services in the pipeline include EUDAT box – a dropbox-like service for easy sharing & local synching of data as well as generic services to handle real-time data streams and crowdsourced data, and to support semantic annotation.

Keynote presentations from the Human Brain flagship project by Richard Frackowiak, Ewan Birney on Annotating the Human Genome, Helix-Nebula the Science Cloud by Maryline Lengert and a view from across the Atlantic from Bill Michener on DataONE will be given together with the latest updates on data infrastructures in the EU’s imminent Horizon 2020 programme from the European Commission’s Kostas Glinos, European and the EUDAT story so far will be narrated by Kimmo Koski, EUDAT Project Coordinator. Progress on series of Research Data Alliance activities and working groups will round up the event.

Check out the rich three day programme at http://www.eudat.eu/events/programme-eudat-2nd-conference and register on-line. Don’t miss the early bird registration deadline on 20^th September. Follow EUDAT on Twitter @eudat_eu for conference updates.

Valletta (Malta), 26th September 2013

First Workshop on “Linking and Contextualizing Publications and Datasets”

This workshop was organized in conjunction with the 3rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2013).

Motivations

Modern scientific communities and their research infrastructures serve for discipline-specific activities whose input and output affect and are affected by scholarly communication. To cope with the increasing speed of such activities and the growing volumes of research outcome, communities need to be facilitated at publishing, interlinking, contextualizing, preserving, discovering, accessing, and reusing their research outcomes. Achieving such objectives would foster multi-disciplinarity, generate novel research opportunities, and endorse quality research. However, researchers rely on different technologies and systems to deposit and preserve their research outcome and their contextual information. Datasets and publications are kept into Digital Libraries and Data Centers together with descriptive metadata. Contextual information is scattered into other systems, for example CRIS systems for funding schemes and affiliation, national and international initiatives and registries, such as ORCID and VIAF for people and authors. The construction of Modern Scholarly Communication Systems capable of collecting and assembling such information in a meaningful way has opened up novel research challenges in the fields of Digital Library, e-Science, and e-Research.

Workshop Objectives

The goal of this workshop was to provide researchers and practitioners in the fields of Digital Libraries, e-Science, and e-Research, with a forum where they can constructively explore foundational, organizational and systemic challenges in contexts having publishing, interlinking, preservation, discovery, access, and reuse of publications and datasets as focal points. It expects to contribute to the actual picture of the state of the art approaches and solutions that researchers and practitioners active in these fields have investigated and realized.

Web site: http://lcpd2013.research-infrastructures.eu/

E-mail: lcpd2013@isti.cnr.it

Workshop topics

The workshop welcomed submissions reporting on theoretical, systemic, and foundational work targeting popular topics of linking and contextualizing datasets and publications. The topics of this workshop were of interest to, but not limited to, the following research avenues:

– Metadata formats for publications and datasets: interlinking or contextualizing research outputs.

– Metadata access services: exporting/discovering metadata to facilitate interlinking or contextualizing research outputs.

– Data models expressing relationships between publications, datasets and other information apt for re-use, contextualization, etc.

– Aggregation services: robust and scalable collection, integration, storage, interlinking, and visualization of heterogeneous objects and metadata from publication, dataset, and contextual content data sources

– Linking and contextualization services: processing/mining interlinked objects and metadata relative for enrichment, disambiguation, annotation

– Future publication models and services: novel concepts and management of enhanced publications, research objects, executable papers.

For more on these topics, please visit the workshop website.

Invited speakers

Sšren Auer, UniversitŠt Leipzig

Sarah Callaghan, British Atmospheric Data Centre, STFC

Workshop Organisers

– Lukasz Bolikowski, Centre for Open Science, ICM, University of Warsaw, Poland

– Paolo Manghi, Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione (ISTI), National Research Council – (CNR), Pisa, Italy

– Nikos Houssos, EKT, National Documentation Centre, Greece

– Jochen Schirrwagen, Bielefeld University Library, Germany

Sponsored by OpenAIREplus (www.openaire.eu) and EuroCRIS (www.eurocris.org)

Web site: http://lcpd2013.research-infrastructures.eu/

E-mail: lcpd2013@isti.cnr.it

This Workshop was organized in conjunction with TPDL 2013

just closed...exhibitions, special sessions, panels, tutorials and workshops

Digital Heritage 2013 event in Marseille

Digital Heritage 2013 is just closed.

The event was very wide including 350 presentations, some 100 full papers, 130 short and special session papers, 90 posters, 20 panels, tutorials and workshops, and 37 exhibitions.

For this reason, to provide an effective way for participants to explore such a rich and diverse program, Digital Heritage 2013 built an interactive schedule featuring social networking, a personal agenda builder, dynamic attendee directories, and more. Users can view the schedule in list, grid, and other forms as well as on mobile devices.

Users are invited to plan accordingly and note travel times between buildings in scheduling the visits. Ample ’down time’ for interaction with colleagues has been scheduled through cultural tours on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons and with a Gala Dinner on Thursday evening.

Note for the participants: if you have already registered for the congress, you will soon receive an email inviting you to add your profile (with option of bio and picture) into the interactive program. You can also tag talks you plan to attend to build a personal schedule and help us adjust room capacities.

http://www.digitalheritage2013.org/scientific-program/

This unique first ever International Congress covers heritage in all its forms, with talks grouped in 6 thematic Tracks. Alongside there are topical Special Sessions led by many federating events, from CAA to Arqueologica, and Space2Place to ICOMOS ICIP, UNESCO’s Memory of the World and Museums&Tech.

Dedicated sessions are focusing on EU projects with presentations of Europeana Photography, EAGLE, and many more.

Madrid, 16-20 September 2013

EGI Technical Forum 2013

The EGI Technical Forum 2013 took place from 16 to 20 September in Madrid at the Meliá-Castilla Hotel & Convention Centre. The event was being organised with the support of the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain, the Spanish National Research Council and Red IRIS.

The event was hosted by EGI.eu and IBERGRID, a partnership between the Spanish and Portuguese National Grid Initiatives that represents the Iberian Peninsula in EGI.

Theme

EGI has established an open compute and data infrastructure built by federating national computing and storage resources across Europe and around the world. The EGI Technical Forum reflected on the current achievements and set the course in motion for future developments. The forum focused on EGI’s strategic aims for 2020:

Support research communities and researchers to tackle societal challenges through the use of innovative technology;
Bring a federated cloud infrastructure into production to enable the work of a diverse new generation of users, while sustaining and improving the existing grid infrastructure;
Create a community of experts that use, operate, manage, develop, support and provide outreach;
Steer the financial, technical and political governance of the EGI ecosystem so that it continues to thrive for the decades to come.

In view of the growing impact and recognition that the EGI Forums have had within the grid user community, the following other conferences were also being co-located at this event:

IBERGRID 2013 19-20 Sep

EU-Brazil OpenBIO 18-19 Sep

Open Grid Forum 39 16-18 Sep

CloudPlugFest workshops 18-20 Sep

GlobusEUROPE2013 19 Sep

Co-location of these conferences aims to ensure the event was attractive to a very wide audience of technology and resource providers as well as the leaders who are at the cutting edge of research.

Further details are available via the EGI TF13 Website.

During the “VRC Project cases Whorkshop” (Wednesday 18/09, h. 14.00) there was a presentation taken by Rosette Vanderbroucke and Antonella Fresa on “An e-infrastructure for the Digital Cultural Heritage sector and the humanities research” (PDF, 1,15 MB) related to and as representatives of the DCH-RP project.

Vilnius, 7 November 2013

Europeana Photography @ ICT2013, IPR networking session

ICT2013 was a major event this year, in Vilnius during the semester of Lithuanian Presidency of EU.

EuropeanaPhotography could not miss to participate in it, to disseminate to the whole community the important results that were achieved so far, in particular on the side of IPR related to digital content.

A special get-together networking session that took place on 7th November to discuss such important topic with experts from public and private institutions, Europeana Foundation, representatives from other digitization and research EU projects, as well as private companies and consultants.

The participant speakers were:

Antonella Fresa, Promoter srl, Technical Coordinator of EuropeanaPhotography
Andrea de Polo, Fondazione Alinari
Viktorija Jonkutė, Lithuanian Art Museums
Julia Fallon, Europeana Foundation
Jacqueline Cawston, the Serious Games Institute
Evgeny Kossev, Regional Museum of History – Stara Zagora, INSIDDE project

The session also included a presentation related to the IPR activities at the University of Coventry, coordinator of EuropeanaSpace and RICHES projects, both in negotiation. The presentation was illustrated by Antonella Fresa on behalf of dr. Marion Doyen.

The session was intended to foster knowledge exchange and networking actions to address a very common and shared issue from different points of view and backgrounds, also in the light of enabling a true, exploitable creative re-use of the digital content available in Europeana and in other online collections.

Download the presentation “IPR related to digital content” (PDF, 1,7 Mb)

Outline of the session (PDF, 192 Kb)

Networking session description on ICT2013 page.

ICT2013 at booth 5, 7th November 9.00 am.

[Show as slideshow]

Panel discussion chaired by Wim Jansen (DG Connect, EC) at the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries TPDL 2013

eInfrastructures and Digital Libraries…
the Future

The result of the digitisation initiatives carried out by memory institutions (museums, libraries, archives) in Europe and world-wide has produced a large amount of cultural content, which is continuously growing.

The existing services – e.g. the metadata aggregators, such as Europeana and the national cultural portals -, even if important to mobilise attention and resources on the general theme of the digitisation of cultural heritage, have limitations that do not allow to unlock the whole of this potential. On the other hand, the research infrastructures (e.g. DARIAH) are currently missing most of the cultural heritage data, including the data that are hold by local institutions.

The idea of a digital cultural heritage e-infrastructure is to set-up a “common pot”, where institutions can deliver safely their content, which can be seen as a “continuum” by the users. Further, the content that are ready to be open can then be used to develop and demonstrate use cases to encourage more institutions (both national and local one, also small institutions) to adhere to the initiative.

The digital cultural heritage content is made of several different kinds of information: data (2D images and 3D models), metadata, publications, digital exhibitions, virtual reconstructions.

Even if growing very rapidly, the actual size of this content, if measured in byte, is still very much smaller than the amount of data produced by the experiments and the observations of the “hard sciences”.

However, its value is very much high, also because the content related to the digital cultural heritage is produced with a very intensive human work, which makes it expensive and unique. Therefore, preservation has the highest priority for the digital cultural heritage domain and the e-infrastructure services envisaged for cultural heritage and humanities should include preservation features, ranging from long-term to short-term storage. In addition to the storage resources, also the computing resources of the research e-infrastructures (both grid and cloud) can serve the preservation needs. An interesting experiment is the use of the grid to perform regular check-sum test, to monitor any damage or corruption to the data.

Further, the digital cultural heritage content is composed by information that is strongly linked. For example, the individual cultural object needs to be studied with respect to its context (that is made of information possibly coming from different data bases) and in the frame of the collections it belongs to. The improvement of the search technologies, in particular the application of semantic technologies, is very promising in this field. More generally, the linked (open) data movement is very much discussed in the cultural sector as a frontier to be reached to empower the digital cultural content with more links. Features to manage semantic search and linked open data are necessary components of the digital cultural heritage e-infrastructure.

Even if not strictly a technological matter, the issue of openness of digital cultural content is another main challenge that the sector is approaching when moving online. To this regard, it should also be noted that the digital cultural heritage content is of great interest for many different targets: the research (both humanities and other sciences, e.g. archival data are currently offered for investigation to medical researchers and economists), educational products and the creative industries. Often, the partnerships for the exploitation of cultural data (both use and re-use of data) see public and private organisations working together, with the need to combine commercial and not-for-profit approaches. For this reason, digital cultural content needs to be accessed differently by each target, and therefore, authentication and authorisation mechanisms are important to be put in place efficiently by the e-infrastructure.

For more information:

download the presentation made by Antonella Fresa and Rosette Vandenbroucke at the EGI Technical Forum 2013 in Madrid;
download the background note of the e-Infrastructures panel at TPDL 2013
download all the presentations made during the e-Infrastuctures panel at TPDL 2013 (archive file RAR, 8 Mb) or download the single presentations below:

DCH-RP workshop organised in the frame of the 2nd EUDAT International Conference

Digital Preservation of cultural data @ EUDAT, Rome

“Digital Preservation of cultural data” is the title of the workshop organised by DCH-RP in cooperation with EUDAT, SCIDIP-ES and CHAIN-REDS in the framework of the 2nd EUDAT International Conference in Rome.

The workshop was a very successful event, bringing together projects and initiatives working world-wide in the domain of the digital preservation, with a specific focus on digital cultural heritage, digital arts, digital performances and digital humanities, to identify common goals and strategic approaches, find synergies, and discuss opportunities for cooperation, starting from concrete use cases.

Here below you can find all the presentations made during the event and some background information.

Programme and presentations

14:30 – 14:45 Welcome and introduction (Antonella Fresa, Promoter Srl, download PDF)

First Part: DCH and the e-infrastructures

14:45 – 15:10: Using EUDAT services to replicate, store, share, and find cultural heritage data in Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center (Maciej Brzeźniak, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center – Damien Lecarpentier, CSC – IT Center for Science, download PDF)

15:10 – 15:35 Authentication and Authorisation in the Cultural Heritage community (Roberto Barbera, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, download PDF)

15:35 – 16:00 Scalability in preservation of cultural heritage data (Simon Lambert, Scientific Computing Department – STFC, download PDF)

16:00 – 16:30 Break

Second Part: OAIS model, standards, provenance and authenticity

16:30 – 16:50 Standard models and formats for digital preservation (Börje Justrell, Swedish National Archives, download PDF)

16:50 – 17:15 Implementation of authenticity evidence record model for supporting preservation scenarios (Luigi Briguglio, Engineering R&D Lab, download PDF)

17:15 – 17:30 Coordination of digitisation, digital access and digital preservation in Sweden (Sanja Halling, Digisam, download PDF)

Attendees

Download here the list of participants to the workshop.

Context and objectives

Medicine and Natural sciences, including astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth sciences and physics, already make use of standardized formats and e-Infrastructures services to generate, curate, share and analyse research data.

The need for novel more efficient and affordable solutions for digital preservation is now increasing also in the Social Science and Humanities, in particular the Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) sector is producing a large volume of digital content that needs to be safely stored and curated, permanently accessed, and easily shared and re-used by researchers.

Illustration from www.digitalbevaring.dk

Each digitisation programme is currently addressing the issue of preservation in a separate manner, a shared implementation of common e-Infrastructure layers could be beneficial and cost effective.

Moreover, preservation models are often inspired by the ISO OAIS standard, where transfers and preservation are built on information packages containing both data and metadata. Even if the transferred files are in standard formats, the implementation of standards cannot be guaranteed and it is not in control neither by the institutions that produces the software for implementing them, nor by the memory institutions.

E-Infrastructures and DCH communities entered a dialogue in the last years and several data-infrastructure projects exist and look how to set up data infrastructures, including DCH use cases:

DCH-RP: Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for Preservation
SCIDIPES: SCIence Data Infrastructure for Preservation – Earth Science
APARSEN: Alliance Permanent Access to the Record of Science in Europe network
EUDAT: Towards a European Collaborative Data Infrastructure
CHAIN REDS: Coordination and Harmonization of Advanced e-Infrastructures for Research and Education Data Sharing
DARIAH: Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities
DASISH: Data Service Infrastructure for the Social Science and Humanities
CLARIN: Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure
SCAPE: SCAlable Preservation Environments

At the same time, new projects are about to start, such as a joint Pre-Commercial Procurement project – which is now under negotiation – whose main objective is the development of an open source software licensed reference implementation for different format standards as a tool to be used by memory institutions to check conformance with standard specifications.

Aim of the workshop is:

To bring together projects and initiatives in the domain of the digital preservation, with a specific focus on digital cultural heritage, digital arts, digital performances and digital humanities;
To identify common goals and strategic approaches, to find synergies, to discuss opportunities for cooperation, starting from concrete use cases;
To progress towards establishing a Virtual Research Community for DCH acknowledged at European level and to prepare for Horizon 2020.

Target Users

Researchers in the humanities
Teaching and learning actors (schools, training centers, university courses)
Cultural and creative industry for the creative use and re-use of the digital cultural content
Content providers (e.g. cultural managers of national institutions and libraries, small institutions, private and public publishers, etc.).
Policy makers and programme owners
E-infrastructure providers, technology providers and R&D institutions
R&D projects and initiatives focusing on digital preservation

Contact details

Name: Claudio Prandoni

Affiliation: Promoter Srl

Email: prandoni@promoter.it

Project's progress, and a nice city

Vilnius, Europeana Photography meeting

Viktorija Jonkutė

by Valentina Bachi

The third EuropeanaPhotography plenary meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, took place on 9 and 10 September 2013, organized by Viktorija Jonkute at the premises of the Vytautas Kasiulis Art Museum and the Lithuanian Art Museum (LAM). The meeting was the occasion for the partners to meet again and discuss the hot topics, in the light of progressing with the project towards its second year’s objectives.

Intermediate objective is to deliver to Europeana a huge number of metadata, in order to publish a first batch of images to witness the history of Europe and the art of photography in the period 1839-1939. The images are supposed to be on line and accessible to everyone by early 2014, and for this reason EuropeanaPhotography content providers are working closely to the technical deadlines to allow this result. In particular, the Vilnius meeting was also the place for another training about the use of the EuropeanaPhotography MINT tool and the integrated multilingual vocabulary.

The partners are followed up and supported by a special “metadata task force”, set up in July, that will help meeting and resolving any possible difficulty.

the metadata task force, A. Fresa, V. Bachi, N. Van Steen, S. Taes, N. Simou, during the meeting in Peccioli at Promoter’s premises

A major part of the meeting was dedicated to the communication strategy and the preparation of the final exhibition, which is going to have place in 2014: for this reason it is time to start thinking and planning its organization.

The exhibition will be a travelling event to show recent history, art and photographic techniques, thanks to masterpieces of photography from all over Europe, carefully selected to amaze the public.

More news are to come soon about this topic.

St. Peter and St. Paul church – internal

The plenary meeting was joined to other very interesting and important cultural events: a photographic exhibition and a international conference where some of the EuropeanaPhotography partners discussed valuable topics, as widely described by the project coordinator Fred Truyen in his blog.

Download the presentation “The creative re-use of digital cultural content” taken by Antonella Fresa

The Vilnius meeting was warmed by a summer sun and a kind welcome of the Lithuanian colleagues, who, beside their very nice hospitality, showed the very rich heritage belonging to Vilnius and to Lithuania. It is no surprise that UNESCO declared this city a World heritage.

Cathedral St. Stanislaus and St. Ladislaus

A bus tour allowed the participants to discover nice corners of the city, its two rivers, the newest modern quartier with high buildings and the wooden country houses so beautifully preserved, the elegant boulevards, the neoclassical city center, the KGB building with its sinister memories, the Uzupis Republic of artists – the fashion quartier, a self-proclaimed, unofficial republic inhabited by artists and dreaming bohemians.

Special stops allowed a visit to the magnificent church of St. Peter and Paul, the white pearl

“Miracle”

of the Baroque, and to the main Cathedral dedicated to St. Stanislaus and St. Ladislaus, where the recent history of 1989 about independence and renaissance of a whole country still permeates the atmosphere.. the belief and hope is that a miracle (stebuklas in Lithuanian) is going to happen soon.

Maybe will it involve the digital technologies and their applications, to unlock the potential of Europe’s cultural heritage?

EuropeanaPhotography was also presented on the national TV in a short reportage about the exhibition of old photographs (Lithuanian language, video here).

[Show as slideshow]

BPN project on the Europeana Professional blog

Linked Heritage project presents results

We report below an article published on the Europeana Professional Blog*, on courtesy of Beth Daley.

“The Linked Heritage project draws to a close at the end of September 2013. Linked Heritage – with the strapline, ‘Share culture, link content’ – was a content-focused project, which aimed to bring large quantities of content into Europeana, to enhance metadata quality and to improve the search, retrieval and re-use of Europeana content. So, has it achieved its aims? What has it brought to the world of digital cultural heritage?

The Linked Heritage end-of-project brochure is available in English and French.

30 months on, its results are impressive. 38 partners from 26 countries, together with 10 more external contributors recruited during the project including Lithuania, Russia, Croatia and Ukraine, coordinated the aggregation of over 2.7 million items to Europeana, making it one of Europeana’s biggest aggregators. The Linked Heritage aggregation includes data from archives, museums, libraries, research centres and universities, and covers 3D models, manuscripts, ancient prints, medieval antiquities, archaeological artefacts, monuments, Greek and Latin inscriptions, fossils, ancient and modern paintings, ethnographic collections and more.

Example of Linked Heritage data now available in Europeana. Michel Tordeux, Vélocipède, 1868-1870, copyright KMKG-MRAH. From project partner Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels, KMKG, Belgium.

To achieve this, the project implemented a smooth workflow for mapping and aggregation activities, as well as training for content providers in the aggregation process. The Linked Heritage aggregation platform was made available online for training and validation.

In terms of metadata quality, the project gave advice about the use of persistent identifiers and their use in linked data. It addressed the issue of non-standard descriptive terminologies, enhancing the quality of Europeana content in terms of metadata richness, re-use potential, and uniqueness. The project also explored the management of metadata in the private sector and outlined the benefits of private sector interoperability with Europeana.

Example of Linked Heritage data now available in Europeana. Łazienki Królewskie (Royal Baths) in Warsaw, Palace on the Water, one of the most outstanding Neoclassical palaces in Poland, built in 1770 and commissioned by King Stanisław August Poniatowski. From project partner ICIMSS, Poland.

Marie-Claire Dangerfield, from Europeana’s Aggregation team, worked closely with Linked Heritage and says, ‘The Linked Heritage technical team maintained strong communication links with the Europeana throughout the project, particularly relating to the submission and ingestion of datasets. With their help we were able to communicate with their providers in a timely manner. The project’s focus on metadata also contributed to the way in which the Aggregation team will deal with metadata and metadata quality in the future.’

Example of Linked Heritage data now available in Europeana. Monument to Nicolaus Copernicus in Toruń univeristy campus, erected in 1973. Photo by Piotr Kożurno. Copyright by ICIMSS, Poland.

Linked Heritage published several reports that explored the state of linked data, its applications and potential:

A best practice report on cultural heritage linked data and metadata standards
A state of the art report on persistent identifier standards and management tools
A specification of the technologies for large-scale implementation of cultural heritage linked data
A linked data demonstrator

The project’s work with metadata was continued with an exploration into the management of metadata in the private sector and the benefits to Europeana of interoperability with the private sector. Key documents for this work are:

A vest practice report – Public-Private Partnerships
A specification of the technologies chosen
A specification of legal/licensing environment

Another working group addressed the large gap between the actual state of terminology management in cultural institutions, and the skills and means necessary to deliver these vocabularies in a standardised format.

Example of Linked Heritage data now available in Europeana. Art nouveau tiles from Bydgoszcz, Poland. Photo by Piotr Kożurno. Copyright ICIMSS, Poland.

So what happens now?

The project website and the showcase on Digital Meets Culture will be maintained. meaning that the main results (deliverables, publications, training material, learning objects etc.) remain available for interested users after the end of the project.

The majority of the content providers will continue to send their data to Europeana through the new best practice network Athena+, which started in March this year. Athena+ will carry on the work on terminologies too, with the aim of realising a stable version of the Terminology Management Platform developed in Linked Heritage.

For more information, go to the Linked Heritage website and visit the Digital Meets Culture showcase.”

Download the Linked Heritage end-of-project brochure in English or French.

By Beth Daley

Source: pro.europeana.eu/pro-blog/-/blogs/1896343

* The Europeana Professional Blog is for people working in the field of digital cultural heritage.