Data Quality Committee

Work areas as well as specific tasks will be defined and prioritized as the Committee sees fits and regularly reported and submitted for ratification to the community, notably the Europeana Aggregators' Forum. Items such as mandatory elements for ingestion of EDM data, data checking and normalisation, data completeness have been already added on the menu. The Committee's mission statement is available here.

We defined our main requirements in terms of discovery and information-retrieval requirements. A series of usage scenarios have been created reflecting information-access user needs (based on the Europeana user personas), listing current metadata issues for a given scenario and then proposing future actions. These scenarios focus specifically on metadata and are not tackling any challenges regarding the user interface or the user experience in Europeana Collections.

The Data Quality Committee has developed, together with aggregators, the metadata component of the Europeana Publishing Framework, based on three quality "pillars". The first one is based on the languages in which metadata records are provided, following Europeana's multilingual strategy. The second follows the recommendations of the Discovery - User Scenarios and relies on "enabling metadata elements". These enabling elements are desirable but optional - including them supports functionalities for a specific set of usage scenarios, beyond the fundamental minimum for all metadata descriptions defined by mandatory elements. The third pillar is based on the use of "contextual classes" that provide richer semantics to metadata. More information can be found here.

Metadata on events can bring important information about the history of cultural heritage objects, especially when multiple events (e.g. creation, modification, destruction) can help to distinguish between different contexts. We have written a report that looks at existing events metadata from the community and provides recommendations about supporting events in EDM. This report can be of interest to all Europeana data partners that hold events data, but it may also benefit other non-Europeana aggregation initiatives. You can download the report and the associated documentation through the folder below. 

Metadata problems can occur in many records. We're actively identifying patterns that reflect metadata quality issues such as redundant or incomplete information, lack of normalization and misuse of metadata fields. A work in progress list of these metadata problem patterns can be found here.

The multilingual saturation score is a score for multilinguality which can be applied on statement, property or record level. We defined a simplified schema which is the basis for the measurement assuming that each statement in a property can have one of the following values: a literal, a literal with a language tag, a URI (ideally to a controlled vocabulary). Learn more in this presentation. Note that the implementation work described in this presentation is still ongoing and is subject to changes

• Metadata Quality Assurance Framework at QQML2016 conference - full version from Péter Király
• Metadata quality Assurance Framework at QQML2016 - short from Péter Király
• Improving data quality at Europeana: New requirements and methodes for better measuring metadata quality, SWIB16, Péter Király (Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen), Hugo Manguinhas, Valentine Charles, Antoine Isaac, Timothy Hill (Europeana Foundation)
• Multilinguality of metadata, Measuring the Multilingual Degree of Europeana‘s Metadata, 15th International Symposium of Information Science (ISI 2017), Berlin, 13.03.2017 - 15.03.2017, Juliane Stiller (Berlin School of Library and Information Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Péter Király (Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen). PDF available at https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/docviews/abstract.php?lang=ger&id=43375
• Multilinguality of metadata, Measuring the Multilingual Degree of Europeana‘s Metadata, SI & IT Workshop, Göttingen, May 11, 2017, Juliane Stiller (Berlin School of Library and Information Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) andPéter Király (Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen)
• Data Quality Assessment in Europeana: Metrics for Multilinguality (presentation) (paper), TPDL (meta)-data quality workshop, Thessaloniki, September 21, 2017,Valentine Charles (Europeana Foundation), Juliane Stiller (Berlin School of Library and Information Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Péter Király (Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen), Werner Bailer (Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, Graz), Nuno Freire (INESC-ID, Lisbon).
• Péter Király (Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen) guest at Spark in the Dark webinar episode on Measuring Metadata Quality with Spark (18.02.2018) Host: Christina Harlow. https://code4lib.slack.com/messages/C4FL046FK/
• Evaluating Data Quality in Europeana: Metrics for Multilinguality.  Király P., Stiller J., Charles V., Bailer W., Freire N. (2019)  In: Metadata and Semantic Research, 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 846. Springer

• Fiona Fieldsend, DigitalNZ
• Dulce Fontes, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal

This page was updated in March 2021 to add the sections 'Europeana Publishing Framework - Metadata Quality Tiers', 'Representing events in EDM' and 'Problem patterns' and in 2023 to reflect updates in membership.