Linked Data & DEiXTo

As explained in a previous post, DEiXTo can scrape the content of digital libraries, archives and multimedia collections lacking an API and enable their metadata transformation (through post-processing and custom Perl code) to Dublin Core and subsequently in OAI-PMH or another suitable form, e.g. Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE).
    Meanwhile, the Web has become a dynamic collaboration platform that allows everyone to meet, read and more importantly write. Thus, it steadily approaches the vision of Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web): the Linked Data Web, a place where related data are linked and information is represented in a more structured and easily machine-processable way.

    Linked Data refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. Its key technologies are URIs (a generic method to identify resources on the Internet), the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and RDF (a data model and a general method for conceptual description of things in the real world). It is an exciting topic of interest and it's expected to make great progress in the next few years. A video that does a nice job of explaining what Linked Open Data is all about can be found here: http://vimeo.com/36752317

    Over the last decade, the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) has become the de facto standard for metadata exchange in digital libraries and it's playing an increasingly important role. However, it has two major drawbacks: it does not make its resources accessible via dereferencable URIs and it provides only restricted means of selective access to metadata. Therefore, there is a strong need for efficient tools that would allow metadata repositories to expose their content according to the Linked Data guidelines. This would make digitized items and media objects accessible via HTTP URIs and query able via the SPARQL protocol.
    Dr Haslhofer has performed significant research and work towards this direction. He has developed (among others) the OAI2LOD Server based on the D2R Server implementation and wrote the ESE2EDM converter, a collection of ruby scripts that can convert given XML-based ESE source files into the RDF-based Europeana Data Model (EDM). These remarkable tools could turn out very useful for making large volumes of information Linked-Data ready, with all the advantages this brings.
    Linked Open Data can change the computer world as we know it. So, there is a lot of potential in combining DEiXTo with Linked Data technologies. Their blend could eventually produce an innovative and useful outcome. Many already believe that Linked Data is the next big thing. Time will tell. Meanwhile, DEiXTo could definitely help you generate structured data in a variety of formats from unstructured HTML pages, either your ultimate goal is Linked Data or not.

DEiXTo & Athos Memory

In the context of our collaboration with the awarded Veria Central Public Library, a really remarkable Greek, online digital collection, Athos Memory, has been scraped through DEiXTo in order to be added to the European Library. Athos Memory has been a giant effort of the monastic community of the Holy Mountain to preserve and disseminate the unique religious tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church on this peninsula of Chalcidice. Numerous people have worked tirelessly for years to make this endeavour possible. We would really like to congratulate and thank them for their great efforts and for providing open access to this magnificent collection.

The metadata of 27.223 photographs, documents and digitalized manuscripts from Athos, the Sacred Mountain of Christianity, have been transformed into Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE) format so that they could then be inserted into the Hellenic Aggregator's database.

To give you a better idea of the transformation process, check out the picture below. It's a screenshot of a typical item of Athos Memory archives.

Now, this record, after extracting and repurposing its metadata based on Dublin Core, gets the following form, suitable for exporting it:

Finally, it should be noted that this was the fourth digital library that was included in the Europeana with the help of DEiXTo. And we are eager to add more online resources and help Europeana enrich further its huge cultural and scientific collection!

DEiXTo & Veria Central Public Library

One of DEiXTo's most important success stories is our collaboration with Veria Central Public Library in the context of the EuropeanaLocal project. Veria Central Public Library is a really remarkable library that embraces technology and constitutes a successful model for libraries in Greece and around the world. That's why it received a 1$ Million international award from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2010.

DEiXTo powers the Hellenic Aggregator for Europeana, created by Veria Central Public Library. DEiXToBot based Perl scripts have enabled the metadata extraction of the Music Library of Greece “Lilian Voudouri”, the Greek Educational TV and Corgialenios Digital Library in a format suitable for further processing. Once extracted, their rich content was repurposed through customized Perl code and transformed into Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE) format so that it could then be inserted into the aggregator's database.

This is the reason why DEiXTo was cited at the Symposium "Europeana in Greece" that took place on 19 October 2010 in Athens, Greece, as well as at the 19th Hellenic Academic Libraries Conference (3-5 November 2010, Athens).

Hopefully, more digital libraries/archives will use DEiXTo in the next few months in order to be able to export their metadata to the great Europeana collection (more than 15 million items from 1.500 institutions!). And we are more than glad to help Europeana enrich its content even more!