A metadata model and mapping approach for facilitating access to heterogeneous cultural heritage assets

In the last decade, Europe has put a tremendous effort into making cultural, educational and scientific resources publicly available. Based on national or thematic aggregators, initiatives like Europeana nowadays provide a plethora of cultural resources for people worldwide. Although such massive amounts of rich cultural heritage content are available, the potential of its use for educational and scientific purposes still remains largely untapped. Much valuable content is only available in the so-called long tail, i.e. in niche resources such as specifically themed cultural heritage collections, and are difficult to access from the mainstream hubs like major search engines, social networks or online encyclopaedias. The vision of the EEXCESS project is to push high-quality content from the long tail to platforms and devices which are used every day. The realisation of such use cases requires as a basis (and in addition to the functional components) a common metadata representation and tools for mapping between the data sources’ specific data models and this common representation. In this paper, we propose a data model for such a system that combines federated search results from different cultural heritage data sources. We then propose an approach for metadata mapping, with a focus on easy configurability of mappings, which—once properly configured—can then be executed on the fly by an automatic service. We demonstrate the approach using a real-world example.