The Europeana Creative project allows Europeana to facilitate the re-use of cultural heritage metadata and content by the creative industries. It establishes an Open Laboratory Network, creates a legal and business framework for content re-use, implements all needed technical infrastructure. It creates five pilot applications in the thematic areas of History Education, Natural History Education, Tourism, Social Networks, and Design, and then conducts open innovation challenges to identify, incubate and spin-off viable projects into the commercial sector.
The project also undertakes an extensive stakeholder engagement campaign promoting the benefits of cultural heritage content re-use to creative industries and to memory institutions.
Europeana Creative is co-funded by a 30-months long European CIP PSP project that started in Feb 2013, finishing in Jul 2015. It involves 26 organizations ranging from museums and libraries, to innovation and creative hubs, to proven technical partners.
Contact: Vladimir Alexiev
Project Overview
- Establish the Europeana Open Labs Network of online and physical environments for experimentation and engagement. The Open Labs provide access to technical and business services, and experimentation content to support the development of new projects, beginning with four Open Lab affiliates and a virtual space.
- Create a new Europeana Content Re-use Framework that extends the Europeana Licensing Framework from metadata to content, allowing content providers to make content available for re-use scenarios and to communicate the conditions necessary for commercial re-use.
- Implement the infrastructure and essential transformation services needed to successfully support re-use of cultural resources, at the same time boosting creativity and long-term business development.
- Establish five pilot applications in the thematic areas of History Education, Natural History Education, Tourism, Social Networks and Design. The pilots serve as reference implementations for creative applications using Europeana data
- Run Open Innovation competition challenges that identify, incubate and spin-off five viable projects into the Creative Industry sector.
- Identify business models allowing key stakeholders within the Europeana ecosystem to develop products and services based on the Content Re-use Framework, and to ensure the sustainability of the Europeana Open Labs Network.
- Perform Holistic Evaluation carried out by the project covers all work streams, while the staged delivery of pilots and services supports best practice learning.
- Project results are promoted via an extensive stakeholder engagement campaign in the Creative Industries sector and the Europeana Network. The consortium assembles the required expertise, critical mass and network outreach coverage to successfully realize these objectives.
Ontotext’s Role
- Lead the work on Content Retrieval Services as part of the Content Re-use Framework. The aim of this task is to implement a sophisticated platform for the retrieval of Europeana metadata and related digital content objects in order to enable re-use from applications. The OWLIM platform is deployed for metadata storage and search, continuing our work on the experimental Europeana SPARQL endpoint that received positive feedback from the community. This is a core backend component of the architecture: Europeana Creative makes use of this triple store as a central data integration repository to provide the backbone of the backend architecture.
- Geographic mapping and transformation algorithms, to be used for the creation and management of cultural routes as required by the Tourism pilot
Linking to external web resources (e.g. Freebase, DBpedia, Wikipedia, VIAF, Getty, Geonames). - Services for geo-referencing of data (based on entity extraction) that are required by the Social Networks Pilot led by HistoryPin. Geo-referenced cultural objects can also be used for location-based services.