EDM mappings, refinements and extensions

Europeana has developed a series of EDM profiles to support future data services in the Europeana core platform. These profiles are not yet used for data aggregation but can be used as a source of inspiration for EDM implementers.

In addition to managing data about cultural heritage objects, Europeana also needs to manage information about organizations and the datasets sent by these organizations. Europeana created two extensions to support information about these two entities in a controlled way.

In the aggregation model used to submit data to Europeana, the totality of a curated collection submitted by a data provider may be difficult to find in the large and diverse Europeana dataset. A collection profile has been defined to enable the description of collections in the context of EDM. It will allow data providers to supply curated descriptions of the identifiable collections they have submitted to Europeana, which has great potential use for audiences.

A Task Force as part of the Europeana Sounds project developed an EDM profile for supporting characteristics of sound objects and the metadata describing them. The Task Force identified the specificities of sound object metadata and analysed the needs that could be met using EDM.

This extension, which is documented in guidelines available on the Europeana Knowledge Base, enables providers to include suitable descriptions for their IIIF WebResources in the EDM metadata they send to Europeana.

Europeana is currently defining its Europeana Publishing Framework to promote the re-use of the digital representations provided as part of the delivered metadata. In order to facilitate re-use, Europeana builds facets and filters based on the technical metadata of these digital representations (described in EDM by the class edm:WebResource). EDM was extended to fit the five media types currently supported by Europeana, namely: Sound, Video, Text, Image and 3D objects.

Europeana projects such as Europeana Creative, Europeana Sounds, Europeana Food and Drink, EnrichEuropeana+ and CrowdHeritage support annotations on cultural heritage objects. The EDM profile for Annotations is mainly based on an existing W3C standard, the Web Annotation Data Model, and provides a solution for representing annotations in order to easily share and exchange them across different Europeana-related services. It has benefited from the input of a task force from the EuropeanaTech community, which has inventoried representative use cases and their corresponding data requirements.

This EDM extension supports the representation of relevant provenance information about fully automated or user-assisted enrichment and translation processes, which are increasingly applied by aggregators to improve the quality of the metadata provided to Europeana. First, it allows the separation of original metadata from aggregator's additions or changes. Second, it provides a way to indicate a confidence level for the new metadata, for the cases where automated processes that have a known margin of error are used without a complete quality assurance step (with expert validation, for example).

A first part of this extension is dedicated to representing provenance in the metadata that is delivered to Europeana via EDM's "external" representation in the RDF/XML format. The second part extends the representation used by Europeana internally and in its APIs, by building upon OAI-ORE's proxies and aggregations to distinguish data from different sources.

You are looking for a specific mapping to EDM or for inspiration for your own data implementation?

Europeana has collected all the EDM mappings, refinements and extensions created by data providers while submitting data to Europeana. Check the full Inventory!

If you have new mappings, refinements or extensions of EDM that are not in the inventory, please fill in the survey!