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Workplan

The workplan of EuropeanaConnect is organised in eight main areas of work (workpackages) outlined below.
Documents and presentations produced in the course of the project will be made available from the Results and resources page.

Project Coordinator: Austrian National Library, AT

1. Creating the Europeana Semantic Layer

Leader: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin / Berlin School of Library and Information Science, DE

Europeana intends to use semantic web technologies as its unique selling proposition and to create semantics based functionality and semantic interoperability in three areas:

  • federated content resources on the concept level (bringing together, aligning and harmonising dispersed and partly redundant vocabularies relating to identical concepts and grouping digital content around the semantic nodes created this way)
  • user interface level (allowing users to e. g. automatically find paintings created by Leonardo da Vinci, starting from search terms such as “Mona Lisa” or “La Joconde”)
  • automated processing (both for Europeana plugged into emergent semantically aware WWW services and for the integration of such services into the functional scope of Europeana).
Workpackage 1 is working towards the creation of a repository of harvested semantic resources (such as vocabularies and classification schemes) from the Libraries, Museums and Archives community which will be used as the primary level of user interaction with Europeana. It will deploy a mechanism to ingest semantic material into this repository, convert these data into Europeana semantic representations (mostly based on the SKOS standard), and semantically enrich Europeana content by mapping it to these semantic representations.

Work under this workpackage is carried out in close co-ordination with the planning by Europeana v1.0 of the new release of Europeana.

2. Multilingual Access to Content

Leader: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin / Berlin School of Library and Information Science, DE

This workpackage works to implement the solutions which are needed to provide true multilingual access to the content of Europeana. These will allow Europeana information and objects to be searched and presented independently of the language of both the searcher and the object descriptions. In other words: EuropeanaConnect will enable users to find relevant content in Europeana even if it is not described in their native or preferred language.

To achieve this goal, workpackage 2 will deliver a multilingual infrastructure, consisting of

  • the Europeana Language Resources Repository for translation and mapping,
  • multilingual mapping of subject metadata schemas and other controlled vocabularies (for controlled and precise translations), and
  • a suite of translation modules or services (for integration with the general search and retrieval infrastructure).

WP2 builds on techniques and experiences from the CACAO (Cross-Language Access to Catalogues and On-line Libraries) and Multimatch (Multilingual/Multimedia Access to Cultural Heritage) projects, both dealing with issues in multilingual access to digital libraries and cultural heritage objects respectively.

3. User Driven Development and New Access Channels

Leader:  The Royal Library, The National Library of Denmark and Copenhagen University Library, DK

The objective of this workpackage is to support user driven development by establishing methodologies to measure success and by actually implementing and testing new access channels for Europeana.

To this purpose, the workpackage's team is enganged in activities aimed to:

  • implement a visual interface that will provide multi-dimensional browsing and search in time and space.
  • make use of both time-related and geographical metadata, and of the integrated GIS services, to cluster and display large amounts of query-data according to their time-space distribution.
  • based on a requirements analysis, implement middleware and clients for mobile access to Europeana. The middleware will process queries from mobile devices and adapt results for mobile usage and presentation. A rich mobile client to be implemented within EuropeanaConnect will allow for advanced queries and presentations on powerful mobile devices such as PDAs and smartphones.
  • provide a better understanding of what users really expect of Europeana, by establishing a methodology to monitor and evaluate all user interactions with Europeana. The usage-monitoring methodologies to be developed by EuropeanaConnect and the results of deep log analysis will inform the implementation iterations of the Europeana portal (Europeana v1.0) and will thus ensure that the development of Europeana is truly user-driven.

4. Europeana Licensing Framework

Leader: National Library of Luxembourg, LU

This workpackage is working on the creation of the Europeana Licensing Framework by providing a core set of interoperable licences that cover rights information for objects in Europeana. It will deliver an easy-to-use toolset for selecting Europeana Licences and for establishing the Public Domain status of works. Emphasis will be on combining widely used existing licensing mechanisms and services (such as Creative Commons), and on linking to rights clearance support for copyrighted, out-of-print and orphan works.

5. Enabling and Integrating Services for Europeana

Leader: AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, AT

Workpackage 5 has two primary objectives:

to extend, support and strengthen the technical capabilities of the Europeana portal through the following four additional components:

  • the Europeana Metadata Registry, which will manage the range of metadata schemas and terms by the various Europeana institutions providing content for Europeana,
  • the Europeana Service registry, which will enable Europeana to integrate practically any external service,
  • the Europeana Resolution Discovery Service, which will allow for uniform resource identification between services and portals and provide for the portal interoperability that supports the integration of a critical mass of European digital heritage content for the end user, and
  • the Europeana OAI Management Infrastructure, which will provide a critical administrative tool for managing a huge number of OAI sources across Europe.
    (Open Archives Initiative - develops and promotes interoperability standards aimed at facilitating the efficient dissemination of content).

to integrate three independent value-added services with the Europeana portal: a GIS Service suite, a Multimedia Annotation Service, and the eBook-On- Demand Service. These services will enhance the value to the Europeana portal in numerous ways:

  • The Multimedia Annotation Service will allow citizens across Europe to make their own contribution to the portal’s content in the form of comments, discussions, and linking.
  • The GIS Service suite will allow users to query and display content based on spatial dimensions, or to discover new relationships between content based on location.
  • The eBook-On-Demand service will enhance access to content by making all copyright free books in Europe available as an electronic book upon user request.

6. Audio Aggregation

Leader: Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, DE

This work package will add the music dimension to Europeana. This workpackage's aim is to harvest audio and related data from content owning archives. It will establish best practice routines for these activities and will lay the foundation for all future music audio integration into Europeana.

The workpackage is also working to implement and evaluate access to right-free or wholly-owned music for all users of Europeana and it will integrate the framework created by the successful DISMARC eContentplus project in Europeana, extending the technical, editorial and legal solutions of this platform.

Finally, the workpackage will provide the necessary infrastructure for harvesting, analysing and storing of audio metadata as well as music audio provision to Europeana.

7. Dissemination and Concertation

Leader: EREMO S.R.L., IT

The objectives of this workpackage are

  • to create consistent and high quality access to EuropeanaConnect’s own results and related developments for project partners and an external professional audience through its website and dissemination service.
  • to work in concertation with Europeana v1.0 as a kind of integrated super network for dissemination purposes by participation in Europeana v1.0’s 'Europeana Cluster Comms Group'. Its role is to ensure good communication between these projects and to maximise opportunities for dissemination.
    Europeana version1.0 is the sister project of EuropeanaConnect: it will turn the Europeana.eu prototype into a full operational service, providing by 2010 access to over 10 million digital resources.
  • to coordinate the planning of concertation events planned and carried out by other EuropeanaConnect work packages.

8. Project Management

Leader: Austrian National Library, AT (Project Coordinator) and the Project Management Team

This workpackage ensures the technical and legal compliance of the consortium in its contract with the European Commission. It takes care of the overall finances of the project and ensures that the consortium is effectively managed and coordinated to meet its set objectives.