Not (just) a Repository, nor (just) a Digital Library, nor (just) a Portal: a portrait of Europeana as an APIPaper by Cesare Concordia, Stefan Gradmann and Sjoerd Siebinga, presented by Catherine Lupovici at IFLA, Milan in session 193 of the IT section, 27 August 2009

What is Europeana?

• Europeana is a European Commission funded project of the EDL Foundation. eContentPlus programme

• Objective to provide a single access point to the digital content from Europe’s Cultural Heritage institutions:

• Archives, Audio-Visual archives, Libraries, and Museums• In November 2008 the first prototype was launched: http://

www.europeana.eu with 4 million items.• In July 2010, the operation service will be launched with over 10 million

items.

• Europeana group of projects• Run by different cultural heritage institutions, partly funded by the

European Commission under econtentPlus programme• Will be contributing technology solutions and content

Aggregation organisational model

Europeana content & object model

• Europeana stores Digital Object Surrogates• Metadata, licensing information, abstractions, annotations,

representations like a landing page or ORE resource maps• View, play, reuse is done in the object’s original website and objects

are stored in distributed repositories at institution and/or aggregator

• Europeana Object model • Has to interoperate with the object models used by contributing

projects and aggregators when ingesting the contributed content• Has to handle content created by Europeana at the ingestion stage &

user generated content. Could be links to nodes of semantic network• Has to allow the Europeana content dissemination

• to the user centered services proposed in the Europeana business model

• to other applications building services on the Europeana repository of Digital Object Surrogates

Europeana surrogate model logical overview

Digital surrogate object and context model

DPO = born digitalDRO = digitisation

User access: semantic and surrogate layers

User access: virtual circle of cultural heritage sites

Europeana and APIs

• Strong requirement for an effective interaction between Europeana portal and partners discovery applications and agreement on the services to the users to be covered

• Europeana functional architecture specifications proposes APIs for interaction with external services such as

• Metadata enrichment, geolocating services• Search• Surrogate exposure as the standard way of surrogate delivery to

other applications• More services to be defined for the second release April 2011

• End user centered• External application centered

What is an API

• An application programming interface (API) is an interface that defines the ways by which an application program may request services from another program and/or operating system

• A Web Service (also Webservice) is an API based on the http web protocol

• Available Public APIs http://www.programmableweb.com

Conclusion

• First release will include at least a simple Europeana search API

• The Europeana.eu source code is made available under a European Union Public Licence [EUPL] open source license

• We encourage the community to: • use the Europeana code and data in their own environments for experimentation. • download the code on EuropeanaLabs for reuse locally

• Europeana is creating a lab environment for partners to: • test code and new functionality that is being delivered as part of

their work plan • develop innovations and additional features that will benefit

Europeana • use the Europeana source code and representative datasets to

experiment with new applications

http://version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-project/documents

www.europeana.euhttp://version1.europeana.eu

Questions? Questions?