Linked Heritage Glossary

See: Web Ontology Language (OWL)

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) can refer to all the information associated with a real object, including its location, or to any of its potential surrogates, e.g. digital images, a museum collection where it belongs, research documents referring to it and other services. PIDs may be applied to real objects as well as to more abstract concepts like services, transformation issues, aggregation or disaggregation of objects and organizations.

PID functional requirements are the following: uniqueness, persistency, resolvability, reliability, authoritativeness, flexibility, interoperability and cost effectiveness.

Noted persistent identifier systems include: Archival Resource Keys (ARKs), Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs), Uniform Resource Names (URNs), and Extensible Resource Identifiers (XRIs)

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning objects: Persistent Identifier: What if? and Persistent Identifiers: Commercial and heritage views.

See also: Interoperability

A preview, or thumbnail preview image, is a reduced size or length audio and/or visual representation of content, in the form of one or more images, text files, audio files, and/or moving images.

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning object MINT Services and, for Europeana purposes, the document Europeana Portal Image Policy.

See also: Content, Content provider, Data Exchange Agreement (DEA), Data set, Digital object

In the context of the Linked Heritage Project, by private sector (interchangeable with commercial sector) it is meant any organisations involved in creating and selling a media product such as: book publishing, recorded music, film and tv, photography.

Work package 4 (WP4) Public Private Partnership (WP Leader: EDItEUR, United Kingdom) was entitled to investigate the potential for including commercial products in the Europeana Portal, adding the gift shop to European Union's GLAM Web sites, and to explore the state of the art in the management of metadata in the private sector (For further information, see: Linked Heritage: outline of the work packages).

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning objects: Public-Private Partnership with Europeana and Why and how to contribute to Europeana.

By public domain it is meant any content, metadata or other subject matter not protected by Intellectual Property Rights and/or subject to a waiver of Intellectual Property Rights (See: DEA, Art. 1 Definitions).

Europeana has worked with Creative Commons to develop a simple mark that indicates that a work is in the public domain - the Public Domain Mark (PDM). Note that PDM and CC0 Public Domain Dedication state different rights: PDM can be applied to objects that are not subject to copyright either because copyright has expired (e.g. the author died many years ago) or because the object was never subject to such rights and is therefore in the public domain; the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication can be applied to objects or data that is subject to copyright but where the rights holder wants to waive the rights and dedicate the object to the public domain. It can only be applied by the rights holder or someone who is authorised by the rights holder. CC0 is specifically designed for use with (meta) data sets and is unlikely to be used as a rights statement describing content. In the context of Europeana, CC0 is primarily used to ensure that metadata can be used without any restrictions. The CC0 waiver is automatically applied to all metadata that is being provided to Europeana.

Explore further: Europeana and the Public Domain

See also: CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication, Data Exchange Agreement (DEA)

A query is a search in a search engine of a local database, online catalogue, web browser etc.

See: Resource Description Framework (RDF)

Resource Description Framework, in short RDF, is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. It has come to be used as a general method for conceptual description or modeling of information that is implemented in web resources, using a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats.

RDF is based on the principle of object and subject and the relation between them. The relation is a predicate. Object, subject and predicate are RDF triples. SKOS, developed to express knowledge information systems such as controlled vocabularies and exchangeable in RDF, is completely built on triples.

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning object: Terminology.

See also: OWL, Semantic Web, SKOS

The Semantic Web, also referred to as the Web of Data, can be defined as a group of methods and technologies to allow machine  (application) to understand the meaning (or "semantics") of information (data) on the Web. According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), "The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries", to achieve better search results, irrespective of language. This can be done by automatically linking “separate” data on the web. When every concept is interlinked as an equivalent, synonym, broader or narrower concept or via any other relator, the web can optimize search results. This will engage greater visibility and easier access to information. The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee for a web of data that can be processed by machines.

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning objects: Terminology and Linking Cultural Heritage Information

See also: Linked data, Linked open data, Resource Description Framework (RDF), Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), XML

SKOS or Simple Knowledge Organization System is a formal data model developed by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to enhance linked open data in the (semantic) web. It is a standard that translates knowledge information systems such as thesauri, classification systems etc. in RDF-triples (SKOS/RDF). Controlled vocabularies structure information via hierarchical, equivalence and associative relations and contain scope notes, translations and other additional information on specific terms. This information can be made accessible on the web when the controlled vocabulary is converted to SKOS. In SKOS the term and all the information it contains is expressed in URIs. This is why in SKOS they are called concepts. In a controlled vocabulary, the term is important, whereas in SKOS, the URI is important. URIs form the basis of linked data on the web.

Conversion to SKOS requires some technical knowledge of RDF and SKOS. This is why the Linked Heritage and AthenaPlus projects developed a Terminology Management Platform (TMP), an open-source tool where controlled vocabularies can be imported and link them to other resources using SKOS.

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning objects: Terminology and Linking Cultural Heritage Information.

See also: Controlled vocabulary, Linked data, Linked open data, Resource Description Framework (RDF), Semantic Web, Terminology Management Platform (TMP)