Natural History in Europeana - Accessing Scientific Collection Objects via LOD

Millions of specimens housed in collections of natural history institutions document our planet’s biodiversity over centuries and represent both an indispensable knowledge base for today’s biological research as well as a cultural heritage. Digitization efforts of the past years have produced a substantial amount of digital assets: high-resolution images, videos, sound files, 3D imagery and 3D models. The OpenUp! Natural History Aggregator draws together these virtual representations of specimens from a multitude of institutions and feeds them into Europeana, the cross-domain portal for Europe’s digitized cultural heritage. Enriching their metadata with data drawn from additional resources such as common names, taxonomic literature and geographic terms helps to increase discoverability und usability. The assignment of stable uniform resource locators and the application of standard vocabularies, existing ontologies and frameworks like RDF allow effective linking of web resources from different knowledge domains, thus creating linked open data.