Work Packages

Linked Heritage is composed by 7 work packages:

WP 1 Project management and Coordination (WP Leader: ICCU, Italy)

Objectives

1) Objectives related to the establishiment of the working groups:

  • To establish the collaborative network of experts and stakeholders who will work together to identify best practice approaches to the Linked Heritage topics
  • To agree terms of reference, roles and responsibilities of the working groups
  • To put in place mechanisms for future planning and sustainability, for network growth and for
  • interaction/integration/interoperability with other projects
  • To provide the technical infrastructure for international collaboration through discussion forums, document
  • sharing facilities, email lists, etc.

2) Objectives related to the project management and coordination

 

WP 2 Linking Cultural Heritage Information (WP Leader: Collections Trust, United Kingdom)

Objectives

  • To explore the state of the art in linked data and its applications and potential;
  • To identify the most appropriate models, processes and technologies for the deployment of cultural heritage
  • information repositories as linked data;
  • To consider how linked data practices can be applied to cultural heritage information repositories, to enrich them and to allow them to align with other linked data stores and applications;
  • To explore the state of the art in persistent identifiers (both standards and management tools);
  • To identify the most appropriate approach to persistent identification, e.g. a unique standard or a set of differentstandards;
  • To design a feasibility model and to realised a demonstrator of a flexible, scalable, secure and reliable infrastructure for a network of ‘linked data enabled' cultural heritage information repositories;
  • To explore the state of the art in cultural metadata models, and in particular their interoperability across libraries, museums, archives, publishers, content industries, and the Europeana models (ESE and EDM);
  • To outline the potential benefits that richer cultural heritage metadata could bring to Europeana, and to the other services which will use it.

WP 3 Terminology (WP Leader: Royal Museum of Arts and History, Belgium)

Objectives

  • On the side of Europeana (front office): In a short term the Europeana portal will require semantically enriched content to make the Semantic Search Engine (as prototyped in ThougtLab) of the portal more effective in its search results. For this they are in need of content descriptions that are expressed in a compliant manner and use specific terminologies designed according to the principles of the Semantic Web. The creation and completion of such terminologies on a common platform, that will facilitate this semantic exploitation of the contents' descriptions, will directly and indirectly lead to the improvement of the Europenana Semantic Search Engine and the end user experience. WP3 aims to enhance the Europeana search experience through more precise search and more relevant results. Namely it will help in front office in Europeana efforts to provide such a powerful search engine to the end user by offering means to yield semantically enriched terminologies and content to provide as input for the Europeana Digital Library.
  • On the side of content providers (back office): To this day there is a rather large gap between the actual situation of terminology management in cultural institutions, and the skills and means necessary to have an effective ingestion of this data into Europeana. This is particularly true if we consider that, in a short term, content providers are expected to provide semantically enriched content. WP3 is one possible answer to reduce such a gap. The implementation of a technical platform for terminology management shall help content providers in back office to input, organize and map their in-house terminologies with a Europeana-compliant multilingual thesaurus that will be made exploitable by Europeana. Consequently it will help content providers enrich their metadata records so that they offer the maximum value to Europeana.

 

WP 4 Public Private Partnership (WP Leader: EDItEUR, United Kingdom)

Objectives 

  • To explore the state of the art in the management of metadata in the private sector, particularly in terms of:
  • Metadata models and sharing/unification of metadata stores, for books, photos, audio/video, tc.
  • Rights frameworks and sharing/publishing of metadata, thumbnails, samples, etc.
  • Recent and/or important rights agreements
  • Persistent identifiers, with the scope of harmonising the solutions in the private and public sectors
  • Controlled vocabularies
  • To outline the benefit to Europeana of interoperability (technical, legal, semantic) with the private sector, and to outline new services and facilities that could be enabled by the integration of private sector content.
  • To identify the most appropriate and useful technologies and facilities to allow the contribution of private sector metadata to Europeana. This may include, for example, gateways for the transformation of metadata standards, harmonised rights agreements based on adjustments to the existing Europeana content provider and aggregator agreements, etc.
  • To outline the process whereby these technologies and facilities can be established and used to enable the contribution of private sector material into Europeana.
  • To specify in detail the technology required to validate this model and process

WP 5 Technical Integration (WP Leader: Institute of Computer and Communication Systems - National Technical University of Athens, Greece)

Objectives

  • To integrate the technical components necessary for the ingestion of content into Europeana (ESE/EDM compliant)
  • To publish interfaces for the integration of the technical results of WP3 within the same user environment (validation)
  • To make this platform available online for validation and for the large-scale contribution of content to Europeana (in WP6) and for dissemination & training (WP7).
  • To involve user representatives from within the consortium in the design and delivery of the system, to ensure that it meets their needs and is user-friendly, reliable and scalable.
  • To verify that the technology platform can be integrated with minimum effort into the Europeana core codebase and/or used by Europeana as a suite of external web services

WP 6 Coordination of Content (WP Leader: The Cyprus Institute, Cyprus)

Objectives

  • To gather feedback for the refinement and improvement of the environment and the system as a whole, in order to support tier-one countries and others who have not yet contributed large amounts of content to Europeana
  • To provide support to the content providers for the mapping of their metadata formats to the Linked Heritage format
  • To contribute large amounts of enhanced content to Europeana, including private sector content

WP 7 Dissemination & Training (WP Leader: Università di Padova, Italy)

Objectives 

  • To stimulate the contribution of content to Europeana by raising awareness of the tools, facilities and best practice provided by Linked Heritage
  • To increase the size of the best practice network by attracting new members
  • To build stronger links between the public and private sectors
  • To raise awareness across the Europeana ecosystem of the Linked Heritage work, and to encourage Europeana itself, content provider and aggregators to take full advantage of the work of the project.
  • To build technical capacity in the cultural heritage sector, especially in terms of Europeana and Linked Heritage technologies
  • To create, deliver and publish training materials; the training material will focus on facilitating the preparation of content for ingestion into Europeana.