Linked Data & Europeana

Antoine Isaac

DARIAH Linked Data workshop

Nov 24, 2010

A web of cultural heritage data?

?

Expected benefits from linked open data for Europeana - http://bit.ly/gT6k2A

Higher Profile

meaningful links between pages makes it easier for people to discover provider’s content, which in turn raises your profile and drives traffic to your website.

Establish Authority

Europeana and its partners can also become authorities for cultural heritage data: a European-wide reference set of CH objects accessible from one place is easier to handle for people who want to make links

Positioning Europeana as a data hub

Now: Europeana object pages

• Landing page for object that redirect to many sites, but are in a single place

• Can be directly consumed by end-users• Can be embedded in other HTML pages

• Is indexed by web search engines

Europeana linked open data for objects

Europeana identifiers and the data they could lead to could be similarly re-used…

• Identifiers used by third-party data publishers in their data• E.g., a research paper being about an object in Europeanapapers:doi-123456 dc:subject europeana:mona-lisa .

• Object data can be easily accessed• Content providers willing to get contextualized data for the objects

they own, or from other providers with similar interest• Third-party consumers

Expected benefits from linked open data for Europeana - http://bit.ly/gT6k2A

New Audience

When people use data to create things like APIs and Mashups, they put your content in new places.

Not only viewing (isolated) objects

Better Customer Experience

Contextualized data enables building innovative, more sophisticated tool

Scholarly inference?

Giving a chance to those better positioned

• Open linked data (as well as APIs) is a way to enable others to provide better experience, and to reach new audience

• Our community is not excellent at figuring out what users want / or may be ready to accept

• Other smaller organizations are better fit for such innovation• Many of them are businesses

Expected benefits from linked open data for Europeana

Efficient Use of Resources

One could re-use Europeana data instead of creating itE.g., data for scientific papers doesn’t have to re-define data for an

object for which Europeana provides it already

Europeana can re-use others’ data which it or its providers cannot produce

• Embedding citations to other reference resources

• Exploit reference data for better object access—thesauri, gazetteers

Making sure providers benefit from it: Europeana’s network dynamics

• Europeana becoming linked open data means cultural heritage data providers’ teaming up to:

• Increase usage of their assets• A unified linked data entry point for data comsumers• Better control the data that is published and consumed on the web

about their objects

More efficient than if they go linked data in isolation

Issues

We have to convince our providers that open linked data is good for them

Issues

• Data would need some enrichment• Simple descriptions, no link to external resources• Low data quality at providers’ side• Data flattening for aggregation

• But we’d be happy if we could publish what we have as such

Questions: Europeana and digital humanities?

Europeana is involved in projects that can bring useful data for digital humanities

CARARE

ECLAP

European Film Gateway

Europeana Regia

Europeana Travel

HOPE

JUDAICA

MIMO

….

http://version1.europeana.eu/web/guest/home

Questions: Europeana and digital humanities?

DARIAH: not providing data, but working with it?

Europeana: just providing data?

Can anyone provide use cases?

That could help us to convince providers to adopt linked data

But there is more…

Example: scenarios for CH and linked data

• Use cases on JISC open bibliographic data sitehttp://obd.jisc.ac.uk/navigate

• Use cases on Library Linked Data W3C group sitehttp://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/UseCases

DARIAH use scenarios?

Questions: Europeana and digital humanities?

We need to know more on requirements which could impact our (linked data) job

• Which providers to focus on?

• What reference data to link to?• Vocabularies, object data sets…

• Which preferred vocabularies for exporting our data?• Beyond EDM (Europeana Data Model)?

• More collaboration?

Thanks!