DM2E releases Europeana Data Model for manuscripts

By Sam Leon, Open Knowledge Foundation.

The Digital Manuscripts to Europeana (DM2E) project team is very pleased to announce that a special specifcation of the Europeana Data Model (EDM) for use with digitised manuscripts is now available.

A manuscript by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche from the Digitale Faksimile Gesamtausgabe - just one of the many thousands of manuscripts being integrated into Europeana as part of the DM2E project.

Why is this important?

The DM2E project is creating a scalable and flexible workflow for integrating digitised manuscripts and associated open metadata into Europeana and the Linked Data Web. In order to do this, we need to develop a way of aggregating the institution-specific ways that data about digitised manuscripts is held by the many libraries and archives across Europe. The EDM itself is designed to be able to handle specifications and we expect to see an increasing number of domain-specific versions of the EDM as more of our cultural heritage is digitised and uploaded to Europeana.

We want your feedback!

We’re very interested in feedback and comments on the current version of the specification, especially from others within the Europeana community who are developing similar specifications for different domains.

Download the specification as a PDF and the owl ontology itself. There is also an HTML representation on Neologism.

For feedback and more information, please write to Julia Iwanowa, Evelyn Droege or Steffen Hennicke.