Goodbye ATHENA - Hello Linked Heritage
Last week saw the final conference of the EC-funded ATHENA Project and the kick-off meeting of its successor, Linked Heritage, in Rome.
For the last 30 months I have been working as a work package leader for the ATHENA project. During that time I have made a least one trip to Europe every month in connection with the project, either to attend project meetings or to promote the project and Europeana.
ATHENA aimed, and succeeded in
- Supporting and encouraging the participation of museums in Europeana;
- Produce a set of scalable tools, recommendations and guidelines on:
- Technical standards
- Metadata;
- PIDs
- Thesauri;
- IPR issues.
- Identifying digital content in European museums;
- Merging all these different contributions into Europeana;
- Developing a technical infrastructure that will enable semantic interoperability with Europeana.
All the the publication of the project, including a journal called Uncommon Culture are available on the ATHENA website:
As mentioned above I also took part in the kick-off meeting of the successor project to ATHENA - Linked Heritage.
The main goals of Linked Heritage are to:
- Provide access to large quantities of previously unseen content through Europeana, from both the public and private sectors;
- Demonstrate enhancement of quality of content, in terms of metadata richness, re-use potential and uniqueness;
- Demonstrate enable improved search, retrieval and use of Europeana content.
Partners are from all the key stakeholder groups from 20 EU member states, plus Israel and Russia. These include ministries and responsible government agencies, content providers and aggregators, leading research centres, publishers and SMEs.
Collections Trust is leading a work package called Linking Cultural Heritage Information. This will deal, amongst other things with:
- The state of the art in linked data and its applications and potential;
- Identifying the most appropriate models, processes and technologies for the deployment of cultural heritage information repositories as linked data;
- Considering how linked data practices can be applied to cultural heritage information repositories, to enrich them and to allow them to align with other linked data stores and applications;
- The state of the art in persistent identifiers (both standards and management tools);
- Identifying the most appropriate approach to persistent identification, e.g. a unique standard or a set of different standards.
Another 30 months of fun!
