A survey of Web technology for metadata aggregation in cultural heritage

Abstract

Abstract. In the World Wide Web, a very large number of resources are made available through digital libraries. The existence of many individual digital libraries, maintained by different organizations, brings challenges to the discoverability and usage of these resources by potential users. A widely-used approach is metadata aggregation, where a central organization takes the role of facilitating the discoverability and use of the resources, by collecting their associated metadata. The central organization has the possibility to further promote the usage of the resources by means that cannot be efficiently undertaken by each digital library in isolation. This paper focuses in the domain of cultural heritage, where OAI-PMH has been the embraced solution, since discovery of resources was only feasible if based on metadata instead of full-text. However, the technological landscape has changed. Nowadays, with the technological improvements accomplished by network communications, computational capacity, and Internet search engines, the motivation for adopting OAI-PMH is not as clear as it used to be. In this paper, we present the results of our analysis of available potential technologies, using as application context the Europeana Network and its requirements for metadata aggregation. We cover the following technologies:

Aggregation of Linked Data in the Cultural Heritage Domain: A Case Study in the Europeana Network

“…The work we present here was conducted in the overall context of a line of research within Europeana, which aimed at improving our Network's efficiency and sustainability. Our earlier studies on this topic identified linked data as a potential technical solution to perform better against these objectives in the area of metadata aggregation [20]. In particular, the study reported here is a follow-up to several experiments investigating various Web technologies for Europeana's aggregation purposes [21,22].…”

Integrating Citizen Experiences in Cultural Heritage Archives: Requirements, State of the Art, and Challenges

“…We survey Web Technologies and their application for metadata aggregation in cultural heritage, reusing the survey conducted by Freire et al [38] and complement it with recent advances, namely the Linked.Art project, the W3C ActivityPub, and The Solid Project. The most established technology for publishing and aggregating digital archives is the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) 9 .…”

“…The most established technology for publishing and aggregating digital archives is the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) 9 . Based on XML technologies and the basics notions of producer and consumer, it's adoption has been widespread before the advent of the REST approach for developing Web APIs [38]. OAI-PMH implements requirement R8/custodian:publish, R22/builder:standards, R31/eco:consume, R37/eco:extend.…”

“…This technologies build on a file specification (Sitemap) and a protocol 11 . Digital libraries on the Web can use Sitemaps to provide a structured catalogue of digital objects within the library [38]. The requirements covered are: R8/custodian:publish, R22/builder:standards, R31/eco:consume, R37/eco:extend.…”

“…It is based on Sitemaps protocol, extended with Websub for supporting notifications. However, its application in the domain of cultural heritage is rather limited [38]. The citizen curation requirements covered by ResourceSync are: R8/custodian:publish, R22/builder:standards, R31/eco:consume, R37/eco:extend, R32/eco:collect.…”