Hi everyone,
did you ever wonder how FAIR data is put into practice? This week I went down the rabbit hole and what I brought back is the start of a new series to unravel the many FAIR data initiatives. There are also some good news for (Belgian) FAIR data in my work update!
❓ This week I have read that Europeana is preparing the ECHOES proposal to respond to a € 110 million call for a European Collaborative Cloud for Europe’s cultural heritage, because they are also coordinating the complementary Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage. Wait, what …? What does this even mean? And what are all these acronyms? Let’s find out in the new FAIR Buzzword Bingo series, where I will focus on one initiative per week. Today: Europeana.
🏢 While working with book translations in the BELTRANS project, we often have to deal with so-called authority data. That is for example data about contributors and places related to book translations. As you might have guessed, there are possibly different data sources with maybe contradicting data. To avoid this and to have a single trustworthy data source in the future for Belgian authority data, we submitted the research infrastructure project MetaBelgica that got accepted!
❓ FAIR Buzzword Bingo: Europeana
There are already countless intertwined research and infrastructure initiatives in the cultural heritage field, even more beyond it. While I went down the rabbit hole I thought it would be nice if I make a series out of it. Every week I will focus on one of the many FAIR data-related initiatives, this week Europeana.
Europeana logo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Europeana (Q234110) is a web portal with which you can discover millions of cultural heritage images and texts that are provided by over 4,000 institutions across Europe. The data is collected not directly, but via a network of aggregators. Like this you are able to discover cultural heritage collections since 2008, Europeana’s inception date.
Did you know that cultural tourism represents up to 40% of all tourism in Europe? And that the cultural and creative industries contribute 3.95% of total EU value added (€ 477 billion)? (source) In order to accelerate the digitization of cultural heritage assets, the European Commission launched the Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage, for which Europeana will be at the basis.
Last but not least, cultural heritage institutions need to be supported so they can benefit in the digital age. Umbrella organizations such as the Network of European Museum Organisations NEMO were advocating for a cloud solution, according to Christian Ehler from the European Parliament. Eventually, under funding of the Horizon Europe programme, there was a call for a European Collaborative Cloud for Europe’s Cultural Heritage.
Christian Ehler argues further that
the cloud is a big equalizer for museums in deprived areas of Europe that currently are happy that they hold up operations.
And this is the context in which Europeana wants to submit a proposal together with various partners (from which I will cover a few in future editions). That joint proposal is called European Cloud for Heritage OpEn Science (ECHOES). They imagine it the following way:
Through the Cloud, [an international group of researchers] could have access to online tools and/ or develop applications that would facilitate their joint work: from exchanging datasets and data files, to accessing collaborative workspaces and workgroups, as well as having direct interaction possibilities, along with storing data under European jurisdiction.
Read here about Europeana’s upcoming proposal or check out the press conference introducing the call for the cloud solution.
🏢 Work updates
MetaBelgica
It is one thing to publish FAIR data, but it is another thing of working with FAIR data. As a consumer who gets FAIR data from different sources, you may still have to combine it somehow. And what if the different data sources contradict each other? Which data source is more authoritative?
Imagine the following use case:
The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Belgium has an online record about the painting the marriage of Joseph and Maria, which contains information about the painter Rogier Van der Weyden. At the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR), there is also a record about the same painter, yet both entities are maintained at both institutions at the same time and with different spelling variants (Rogier Van der Weyden or Rogier de la Pasture). Due to the uncoordinated creation and maintenance of Belgian entities, (inter)national users of our catalogues experience a gap in knowledge on these authorities, they need a single trustworthy data source about Belgian entities!
At KBR, we therefore teamed up with the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, the Royal Museums of Art and History and the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage to create a single trustworthy data source for cultural heritage authority data (persons, organizations, time and locations): the MetaBelgica platform. The project got accepted! The platform will run on the Open Source Wikibase software that is also used by Wikidata. The project did not start yet, but be sure that I will talk about it again once it did.
That’s it for this week of the FAIR Data Digest. I hope you found the content interesting. Don’t forget to share or subscribe. See you next week!
Sven