Maria Natale Europeana Meeting, Belgium 16 December 2009

1. eContentplus programme
ATHENA
Access to cultural heritage
networks across Europe
Maria Teresa Natale
Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali
Istituto centrale per il catalogo unico
delle biblioteche italiane
Brussels, 16 December 2009
ATHENA Workshop: Europeana and the accessibility
of the digital cultural heritage

2. The Europeana Family
Judaeica MIMO
STERNA
BHL Museum A Archive A Library A
Library X
National Digital Library
Europeana Film Archive 1
Film Archive 2
Connect Archive X ACE
Film Archive 3
Film Archive X EFG
v1.0
EuropeanaLocal EDL
Museum X Museum 1
ICOM
The European Europe Museum 2
Library
CENL
EURBICA MICHAEL
NL 1 NL 2 NL 3
APENET National Archive 1
National Archive 2
IASA
VideoActive
FIAT
National Archive 3
Europeana Sound Sound
Travel Archive 1 Archive n
Television Television
Archive 1 Archive 2
Presto EUScreen
Prime

3. Basic information
ATHENA is
a network of good practices financed by the eContentplus
programme
a 30 month project (2008-2011) coordinated by MiBAC
a result of the MINERVA project
ATHENA involves:
20 EU Member States, Israel,
Russia and Azerbaijian
109 museums and other important
cultural institutions in Europe

4. The museums’ scenario
in the field of standardisation

5. Towards standardisation
The state of the art
European museums have
different approaches:
•in cataloguing
•in digitisation
•in the use of metadata standards
Often standards are local instead than national

6. Towards standardisation

7. Towards standardisation

8. Towards standardisation
In the Internet age, things are beginning to change
There is more willingness to share
the knowledge on objects and exhibitions
not only during the real visit
but also through digital media
But…

9. Towards standardisation
It is not an easy task!!!!

10. Towards standardisation
w

11. The role of ATHENA
within this scenario

12. ATHENA activities
WP3 – IDENTIFYING STANDARDS AND DEVELOPING RECOMMENDATIONS
TASKS:
Collection of data on the application of standards by European museums
Identification of standards and common harvesting formats and the
publication of recommendations
Review of requirements and specification of tools to support the
conversion of proprietary museum data
WP3: coordinated by
Royal Museums of Arts and History (RMAH), Belgium
Collections Trust, United Kingdom

13. Towards standardisation

14. Towards standardisation

15. Towards standardisation

16. Towards standardisation
LIDO Basics
• LIDO = Light Information [for] Describing Objects;
• Uses CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM);
• Has Display elements and Indexing elements;
• Full support for Multilinguality;
• Aligned to Getty’s CDWA Lite schema;
• Informed by SPECTRUM;
• In ‘use’ in BAM Portal.

17. Towards standardisation
LIDO Top Level Elements
• Identifier • Event:
• Category • Event Set
• Object Classification: • Relations:
• Object / Work Type • Subject Set
(mandatory) • Related Works
• Classification • Administrative Metadata:
• Object Identification: • Rights
• Title / Name (mandatory) • Record (mandatory)
• Inscriptions • Resource
• Repository / Location
• Record (mandatory)
• State / Edition
LIDO vs. ESE
• Object Description The added value
• Measurements of ATHENA

18. ATHENA activities
WP4 – INTEGRATION OF EXISTING DATA STRUCTURE INTO EUROPEANA
TASK:
To develop and broaden the integration of all kinds of resouces used by
museums and other cultural heritage domains in Europeana, focussing in
particular on terminologies and semantic tools
CURRENT ACTIVITIES:
• Analysis and comparison of existing dictionaries, terminologies, thesauri,
classifications, taxonomies etc.
• Analysis and comparison of existing multilingual tools (thesauri, technical
solutions etc.)
• Recommendations for data providers in order to facilitate semantic
integration of their content into Europeana
WP4: coordinated by
Michael-Culture (Aisbl), International Association

19. ATHENA activities
WP4 Survey
Some figures:
Typ e o f t e r m in lo g y
Ont ology
• 24 countries
Classif icat ion/ Ta
x onomy
• 105 terminologies
Glossary
Simple Term list • 40% thesaurus
Thesaurus
0 10 20 30 40 50
• 30% multilingual

20. ATHENA activities
WP4 current steps:
• Identification of cases
• to cover all kind of problems
• from the simplest to the most complex
• A cooperation platform, a Wiki
• to contribute to the first steps of an ATHENA thesaurus
• to share and discuss the results
• Editing of recommendations for museums

21. ATHENA activities
• Prefer the use of thesauri
• SKOSifiable
• Structurally rich enough
• Rather adopted in museums
• Prefer domain‐specialization and create bridges in‐between
• Specialized domain of description
• Little dimension (number of terms)
• Be “general‐user‐oriented”
• Access and retrieval concern
• Combined with professional requirements

22. ATHENA activities
WP7 – DEVELOPMENT OF THE ATHENA INGESTER
TASK:
Development of a tool able to integrate the different standards
and harvesting formats, focussing also on semantic
interoperability
WP7: coordinated by
Institute of Communication and Computer
In order to practically bring Systems-National Technical University of
Athens), ICCS-NTUA, Greece
the ingested content of the Ministrstvo za Kulturo Republike Slovenije
content providers into Europeana (MKRS), Slovenia

23. ATHENA activities
Import, Value
Harvesting, Semantic Export
Parsing, Versioning Mapping, Enrich
Delivery Mapping Publish
Indexing Normalization
Structured Data Europeana
Delivered Interoperable Interoperable
Indexed with reapplied Enabled
Data Semantics Structure
Data enrichment Data
Presentation & Search
Analysis & Statistics
Quality Control
Re-iterate

24. ATHENA ingester
1st step:
Registration of the
content provider:
•Museum
•Library
•Aggregator
•Etc.

25. ATHENA ingester
2nd step: content
ingestion

26. ATHENA ingester
How LIDO will work
with the Athena system
• LIDO is the heart of the ATHENA system.
• It is the concrete result of ATHENA to enable the potentially
rich metadata that museums have about their objects,
together with links to digital surrogates for them.
• Museums will be able to:
• Provide their metadata in the LIDO schema for direct import
into the system
• Map metadata exported from their system.

27. ATHENA ingester
3rd step: mapping
between one’s own
standard and LIDO

28. ATHENA ingester
Technical features
• Implementation in Java
• Database in PostgreSQL
• Queries made with Hibernate
• WebServer Tomcat
• Full Text Index via Lucene

29. ATHENA activities
WP5 – Coordination of contents Belgian NCP
Barbara Dierickx
MAIN TASKS: Rony Vissers
1) Creation of a network of the NCP responsible for: (Packed)
• the data collection
• the involvement of new content providers
• the local dissemination
• the support to the WPs activities
WP5: coordinated by
2) Coordination of the content provision MiBAC, Italy
3) Investigation of national coordination mechanisms
in terms of creation of aggregators (thematic, regional, national)

30. ATHENA activities
WP6 – Analysis of IPR issues and definition of possibile solutions
CURRENT ACTIVITIES:
Overview of IPR legislation with respect to Europeana goals
Identification of possible solutions for conflicts among content providers and
Europeana, also with regard to the Europeana Licensing Framework
Editing of a step-by-step guide WP6: coordinated by
Packed, Belgium
Panepistemion Patron -
University of Patras (UP),
Greece

31. ATHENA activities

32. ATHENA activities
WP1 – Management WP2– Awareness and dissemination
They work in close cooperation to:
• Enlarge the network
• Disseminate the results
• Produce promotional materials and publications
• Organise training workshops for the content providers WP1: coordinated by
MiBAC, Italy
WP2: coordinated by
Stiftung Preußischer
January 2010: Training Workshops in Rome and Berlin Kulturbesitz (SPK), Germany
Stowarzyszenie
on LIDO and the ATHENA Ingestion tool Miedzynarodowe Centrum
Zarzadzania Informacja
(ICIMSS), Poland

33. Network enlargement
with Belgian museums
Signing a cooperation agreement,
you can:
• participate in working groups
activities
• be a content provider
Two possibilities of providing
contents to Europeana
Some Belgian museums have already joined us • Rhine Release (July 2010)
• Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (MuHKA), Antwerpen • Danube Release (July 2011)
• Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Gent
• Agentschap Kunsten en Erfgoed, Collectie
van de Vlaamse gemeenschap

34. Network enlargement
with Belgian museums
ATHENA gives to interested museums:
• Information
• Technical helpdesk
• Training
info@athenaeurope.org

35. http://www.athenaeurope.org

36. Thanks.
Maria Teresa Natale
ATHENA organisation coordinator
mariateresa.natale@gmail.com
www.athenaeurope.org
info@athenaeurope.org