How We're Giving Shape To The Cloud This Summer

The first half of the Europeana Cloud project has seen plenty of discussion about the shape of the project. Those discussions are now feeding into the creation of some key publications, which will further clarify the structure of the Europeana Cloud service.

The Cloud Access Framework will determine the data policy for Europeana Cloud. It will answer questions such as: What metadata formats can be accepted into Europeana Cloud? What is the maximum size for any content being shared? What level of permissions can be set on the metadata and content in Europeana Cloud?

Operating Guidelines will provide further advice to aggregators wishing to use Europeana Cloud: How they upload data? Where it will be stored? How do they become members of Europeana Cloud?

The Cost Model outlines the costs for becoming a member of Europeana Cloud: What costs will be paid by Europeana as part of Connecting Europe Facility? How will aggregators be billed? Can aggregators pay with staff time?

These documents will later be joined by one on Governance Structure that will determine how the Europeana Cloud service is run.

To help prepare all of these documents, members of both Europeana Cloud's strategic and technical work packages (WPs 2 and 5) will come together in three separate workshops. (Project Partners can see further details on our internal site; login required)

We expect to complete the first versions of these documents towards the end of the summer, and will make them public on the website. It is envisaged that these documents will be updated as the project continues, in particular to take on board feedback from the other project members and from aggregators in the Europeana eco-system.

Image by Andrew Morrell, CC BY-ND.