Cesare Concordia

Europeana v1.0

The Europeana v1.0 is a Thematic Network project funded under the Commission’s eContentplus programme 2008 and is the successor network to the EDLnet thematic network that created the EDL Foundation and the Europeana prototype. The goal of the project is to develop an operational service and solve key operational issues related to the implementation and functioning of the European Digital Library. The work will include also a business development operation to ensure that a steady stream of content is made available in the Digital Library.

Design, implementation and evaluation of a user generated content service for Europeana

The paper presents an overview of the user generated content service that the ASSETS Best Practice Network is designing, implementing and evaluating with the user for Europeana, the European digital library. The service will allow Europeana users to contribute to the contents of the digital library in several different ways, such as uploading simple media objects along with their descriptions, annotating existing objects, or enriching existing descriptions. The user and the system requirements are outlined first, and used to derive the basic principles underlying the service. A conceptual model of the entities required for the realization of the service and a general sketch of the system architecture are also given, and used to illustrate the basic workflow of some important operations. The planning of the user evaluation is finally presented, aimed at validating the service before making it available to the final users.

EuropeanaLabs: An Infrastructure to Support the Development of Europeana

This document describes the Europeana Development and communication infrastructure, called EuropeanaLabs, built inside the EU projects Europeana and Europeana v. 2. The EuropeanaLabs consists of a number of servers, storages and communication devices; it is used to create Virtual Machines, called sandboxes, used by Europeana foundation communities. EuropeanaLabs provides a test environment, for applications and demos, to several cultural heritage and technology projects, most of them funded by EU, in addition it features a set of servers for cooperative work. In this paper we present the general architecture of the EuropeanaLabs infrastructure.

The Europeana Linked Open Data Pilot Server

The Linked Data is a set of principles and technologies providing a publishing paradigm for sharing and reusing RDF data on the Web. The Linked Data Cloud is expanding at a very high speed since 2007, when the Linked Data Project was launched. Europeana, the European Digital Library, subscribes to the view of a web of data, and the distribution of cultural heritage data is one of the main objectives established by the Europeana Strategic Plan. The paper illustrates how Europeana publishes Linked Data, with focus on the technological approach adopted.

A Reference Architecture forVirtual Research Environments

This paper describes the Reference Architecture of the enhanced VRE (e-VRE), a Virtual Research Environment defined in the context of the VRE4EIC Project, funded by EU H2020 e-Infrastructure program. e-VRE is designed to overcome limits of existing VREs with respect to a number of orthogonal dimensions: improving the quality of VRE user experience by providing user centered, secure, privacy compliant, sustainable environments for accessing data, composing workflows and tracking data publications; increasing VRE usage in multidisciplinary research domains by abstracting and reusing building blocks and workflows from existing VRE initiatives; improving the interoperability of heterogeneous discovery, contextual and detailed metadata across all layers of the VRE.

ASSETS: Advanced Service Search and Enhancing Technological Solutions for the European Digital Library

ASSETS is a 2 year project co-funded by the CIP Policy Support Programme. The main goal of the project is to improve the usability of Europeana (the European Digital Library) by developing, implementing and deploying largescale services focusing on search, browsing and user interfaces. ASSETS strives also to make more digital items available on Europeana by involving content providers across different cultural environments.