The Entity API allows you to search for or retrieve information about entities that are referred to by items available in Europeana. It presently offers 3 methods:

1. Retrieval of the complete metadata set associated with an Entity

2. A way to suggest entities based on a string

3. a lookup method for resolving external URIs.

About the Europeana Entity collection

In the context of Europeana APIs, an entity can be:

• a person (or “agent”), for instance Lili Boulanger or Claude Debussy;

• a topic (or “concept”) like Art Nouveau, migration or Musique Concrète

• a place, for instance Perpignan, Bratislava or Arnhem

• a time period, for instance the 21st century

Entities are helpful to provide context to an item and relate it to other items that have entities in common, which helps users to discover other items in the collection. They are linked to external data sources and controlled vocabularies like​ Wikidata, AAT, VIAF, ULAN, and Geonames and are regularly updated and consolidated.
The Entity API allows you to search for or retrieve information about entities that are referred to by items available in Europeana.It presently offers 3 methods:

• Retrieval of the complete metadata set associated with an Entity;

• A way to suggest entities based on a string;

• a lookup method for resolving external URIs.

This collection is regularly updated and consolidated from external data sources so that the metadata is kept as fresh as possible.

Identifiers for entities

As linked open data resources, all Europeana entities are identified using URIs defined under the data.europeana.eu namespace. This means that such identifiers are content negotiable to either the Europeana Website or APIs depending on the format requested via the Accept header.

Syntax for URIs:

Example:

Internal view of an entity

The metadata that is made available for an entity is typically obtained from external data sources such as Wikidata. This data can also be complemented or changed to better fit the context in which they are used in Europeana. All this information is kept internally apart with its own provenance information for transparency and to facilitate its maintenance and management.

Supported classes of entities

There are five classes of entities supported by this API, namely: Agent, Place, Concept, TimeSpan and Organisation. The following subsection describe the metadata fields used to describe the entities.

Agent

The Agent entity comprises people, either individually or in groups, who have the potential to perform intentional actions for which they can be held responsible.

Place

A physical location associated to a cultural heritage object. Presently, covers European countries and the most relevant places.

Time Span

A period of time having a beginning, an end and a duration. Presently, only centuries AD are available in the Entity Collection.

Concept

A Concept is defined as a unit of thought or meaning that comes from an organised knowledge base (such as subject terms from a thesaurus or controlled vocabulary) where URIs or local identifiers have been created to represent each concept.

Organisation

The organisation providing data directly or via an aggregator.