During Europeana’s data ingestion process, the received metadata undergoes semantic enrichment. This is a process in which additional information is added to records by linking to contextual resources such as places, concepts, agents, time periods and organisations. Find out how Europeana performs semantic enrichment and what happens when you enrich your metadata with linked open vocabularies supported by Europeana.
Europeana enriches its data providers’ metadata by automatically linking values found in the metadata to controlled terms from the Europeana entity collection. This process of 'augmenting' the source metadata with additional terms is called semantic enrichment.
Example of a record semantically enriched with the concepts “wig” and “costume” from Europeana entity collection: “A man building a wig on to the head of a woman on a kind of scaffolding; another woman wearing a tall wig looks” on, Wellcome Trust: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/record/9200105/BibliographicResource_3000006114081.html
The Europeana Data Model (EDM) gives support for contextual resources - the so-called ‘semantic layer'- including values from vocabularies like thesauri, authority lists, classifications, either coming from the network of Europeana's providers or from third-party data sources. This means that data providers are strongly encouraged to include links from open and multilingual vocabularies in the metadata they send to Europeana.
Europeana has developed a tool that ‘dereferences' contextual resources’ URIs, i.e., that fetches all the multilingual and semantic data that are published as Linked Open Data for vocabulary values on third-party services. Europeana currently dereferences several vocabularies. The mappings of the vocabularies to EDM contextual classes and the configuration files used for dereferencing are available on GitHub. If you would like to have your own Linked Open Data vocabulary dereferenced, please mention it to your Europeana contact.
More extensive documentation on semantic enrichment is available in the Europeana Knowledge Base. Visit the landing page to find more information about how the process works, see which vocabularies are supported and find guidance on how to request support for your own vocabulary.