Description of Cartographic Heritage in Europeana Data Model

Abstract. Europeana is a portal that provides access to millions of objects from all kinds of cultural heritage communities. It enables users to find digital cultural works made available by cultural institutions throughout the European Union. Currently, Europeana provides access to a collection of more than 50 million books, periodicals, video clips, maps, photographs and digital documents from libraries, archives, museums and audio-visual archives in Europe. To facilitate Europeana’s participation in the Semantic Web Europeana Data Model (EDM) has been developed. The idea of EDM is to constitute a framework for collecting, connecting and enriching metadata. It is a theoretical data model that allows data to be presented in different ways according to the practices of the various domains that contribute data to Europeana. EDM brings more meaningful links to Europe’s cultural heritage data. Data from partners or external information resources with references to persons, places, subjects, etc., will connect to other initiatives and institutions. This will result in sharing enriched content, adding to it and thereby generating more content in ways that no single provider could achieve alone.

Presented research is the continuation of authors earlier study. In previous research, authors have proposed to integrate EDM structured information with geographic information system for movable heritage providing the semantic relations of movable heritage to the geographical space. This was a step into mixing GIS and Europeana world with the use of semantic contextualization for the object representations. Current research is the next step in this study and is going towards development of the new areas of EDM implementation – in cartographic heritage description.