The Europeana Business Plan 2014 was published on 12 March 2014.
Three of the Key Performance Indicators in the important Product Development section (see p.30) were implemented by Ontotext within the frame of the Europeana Creative project:
- An OAI-PMH service to allow others to use EDM data in bulk
- Semantic repository (triple store), synchronized with the EDM data
- A SPARQL semantic querying endpoint
OAI and SPARQL access are key new data access channels in Europeana Labs, complementing the existing Europeana API.
Additional notes about these key services:
- The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI PMH) is the fundamental protocol for aggregating data from repositories. It is used by Europeana to ingest data from aggregators and providers. However, Europeana itself does not provide an OAI server until now, which is an important omission. The Europeana OAI server will be useful to keep the semantic repository up to date with new Europeana data; and to other large-scale consumers and aggregators
- Ontotext developed and hosts the Europeana semantic repository on Ontotext GraphDB at http://europeana.ontotext.com. It allows display and downloading of RDF triples and custom views for each Cultural Heritage Object: portal view and graph view. The repository is periodically synchronized with the main Europeana storage (MongoDB) through the OAI protocol.
- The repository provides complete SPARQL 1.1 support and a Full Text Search interface. While more Europeana objects are being semantically enriched, this querying interface will be useful to pose graph (relation-oriented) queries that cannot be answered through the existing Europeana API.
This work was presented at the Europeana Creative final conference: Culture Jam, Vienna, Austria, July 2015, as the poster “O is for Open: OAI and SPARQL interfaces for Europeana”. It includes an example of the EDM graph view (see bottom of figure)
For more information, contact Doug Kimball, Chief Marketing Officer at Ontotext