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Description
To enhance the way Europeana harvests, manages and publishes metadata, Europeana has developed a new Semantic Web-inspired approach for its metadata: the Europeana Data Model. This community-developed model re-uses existing Semantic Web vocabularies (ontologies) such as Dublin Core, SKOS, OAI-ORE, adapting them to the Europeana context. EDM allows Europeana to represent different perspectives on a given cultural object. It also enables the representation of complex, especially hierarchically structured objects as in the archives or libraries domains. Finally, it allows Europeana to represent contextual information, in the form of entities (places, agents, time periods, concepts) explicitly represented in the data and connected to a cultural object. Europeana has documented several case studies that illustrate the challenges and benefits of applying EDM to cultural heritage collections.
The Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE) metadata format currently used in Europeana will stay the core of the new EDM. EDM is then fully compatible with ESE.
Context
Europeana gives people access to millions of digitised objects from Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual collections. Europeana acts as a single point of access to cultural objects (books, museum objects, paintings, films and archival records) that have been digitised throughout Europe. The information that can be found on Europeana comes from cultural and scientific institutions in Europe.
For heritage institutions, Europeana is an opportunity to increase visibility which will result in an increase of their web traffic, better user experience and new partnerships.
At the moment the metadata must conform to the Europeana Semantic Elements, a Dublin Core-based set of fields with 14 additional elements necessary for records to display correctly in Europeana. Aggregators are developing tools to help their providers map their data to the Europeana Semantic Elements.
(Source: http://pro.europeana.eu/about)
Future plans
Europeana is currently working on the Europeana Data Model (EDM) with the intention to replace the current Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE).
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