Linked Heritage Glossary

EDItEUR (UK) is the international group coordinating development of the standards infrastructure for electronic commerce in the book, e-book and serials sectors. EDItEUR provides its membership with research, standards and guidance in such diverse areas as: Electronic data interchange (EDI) and other e-commerce standards for book and serial transactions; bibliographic and product information: the standards infrastructure for digital publishing;  rights management and trading; radio frequency identification tags.

Established in 1991, EDItEUR is a truly international organisation with over 100 members from 22 countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan, United States and most of the European countries.

EDItEUR is member of the Linked Heritage consortium covering the role of WP4 Leader where it actively participates to implement the ONIX mapping. In the context of the training and dissemination activities in WP7, EDItEUR designed two learning objects: Public-Private Partnership with Europeana and Persistent Identifiers: commercial and heritage views.

See: Europeana Data Model (EDM)

A discrete component of metadata, or a discrete component of a data structure defined by a DTD (Document type definition) or schema (often represented through markup in the form of a tag). An element may contain subelements that are called qualifiers in Dublin Core.

See: Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE)

Europeana is the European Commission's flagship digital cultural heritage portal. It can be found at: www.Europeana.eu. It is a central discovery and access point for European historical, social, cultural and artistic materials that have been made available online in digital form by (mainly) cultural / public heritage institutions. Freely accessible to the public, and entirely publiccaly funded, Europeana itself primarily aims to offer:

• Aggregation of metadata about digitised cultural content (again, not the content itself)
• Facilitation of mass digitisation and expertise-sharing projects in the heritage sector
• Distribution of the metadata about existing content (but only the metadata)
• Engagement with European digital culture in new ways developed by Europeana Foundation's projects and those of its network of contributors.

The Europeana Data Model (EDM) was designed to replace the Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE). EDM will gradually make Europeana fit within a networked data environment. It is a much more flexible and precise model than ESE, and offers the opportunity to attach every statement to the specific resource it applies to, and to reflect some basic form of data provenance. The main EDM requirements include:

• distinguishing between a provided item (painting, book) and its digital representations
• distinguishing between an item and the metadata record describing it
• allowing the ingestion of multiple records for the same item, which may contain contradictory statements about it

As a consequence of EDM having to meet these requirements, EDM data has a level of complexity above that which Europeana currently maintains. This level of complexity is comparable to what can be found in the data of many Europeana providers, and thus, it enables better exploitation of that data. Note also that, as much as possible, EDM re-uses elements coming from already-established vocabularies, such as Dublin Core, OAI-ORE, SKOS and CIDOC-CRM, thus lowering the cost of its creation and adoption.

For more information on EDM, you can refer to the EDM Definition and EDM Primer on Europeana's technical documents page. The EDM OWL ontology is accessible through content negotiation but it is also directly available. Please be aware that both data.europeana.eu and those documents are under constant revision. 

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning object: MINT Services.

See also: Web Ontology Language (OWL)

Europeana Network, former Council of Content Providers and Aggregators (CCPA), is an open, expert forum comprising content holders and aggregators along with providers of technical, legal and strategic knowledge. It stands as an organisation that unites all individuals who have a stake in Europeana to ensure an effective dialogue with Europeana Foundation and Office at both strategic and practical levels.

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning objects: MINT Services and Why and how to contribute to Europeana .

Europeana Professional is the common website for Europeana projects, reaching cultural heritage professionals and technologists. It is the official source for technical information, metadata standards and case studies, and also brings together all project work.

Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE) is an application profile based on a Dublin Core-based set of fields with additionally 12 specific europeana elements. ESE is a subset of the Europeana Data Model (EDM), a richer data model that will improve the way metadata can be provided and used in Europeana and beyond. ESE produces a flat record where it is not always possible to tell if a value applies to the original object or to its digital representation. If possible it would be better to provide data using the EDM format. All ESE data will be converted to EDM on ingestion but the conversion from ESE may not be as good as if you had provided EDM directly. Currently Europeana accepts three types of metadata, EDM – EDM, ESE – EDM or Original Format – EDM. The Europeana Ingestion team will carry out the transformation of the data and ensure material is enriched and portal ready.

MINT allows to convert LIDO metadata records into ESE. Even EDM profile is supported by MINT (see: MINT screencast EDM Ingestion Tool).

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning object: MINT Services.

EuropeanaConnect (May 2009 - October 2011) is a Best Practice Network funded by the European Commission within the area of Digital Libraries of the eContentplus Programme. The project developed essential components to enable Europeana to become a truly interoperable, multilingual and user-friendly service. Users can access millions of images, books, maps, video, historic writings and audio files representing Europe's cultural diversity. All publicly available reports produced by the project and presentations relating to its work can be found at EuropeanaConnect: Results and resources.

EuropeanaConnect delivered technical key components such as: the Europeana Semantic Layer; Multilinguality; Front end components - User-friendly interfaces; Europeana Licensing Framework; Audio Aggregation;

The project was coordinated by the Austrian National Library. It started on 1 May 2009 and will run for 30 months until October 2011.