Semantic enrichment with Europeana organisation entities
- Maša Škrinjar
- Adina Ciocoiu
This page describes how Europeana links information about providing organisations to Europeana entities for organisations.
Europeana organisation entities
Data partners include information about organisations involved in the aggregation chain in the metadata, like so:
<ore:Aggregation rdf:about="#Example_01Aggregation">
<edm:aggregatedCHO rdf:resource="#Example_01"/>
<edm:dataProvider>Bibliothèque nationale de France</edm:dataProvider>
<edm:intermediateProvider>The European Library</edm:intermediateProvider>
<edm:provider>Gallica</edm:provider>
[ other Aggregation data ]
</ore:Aggregation>Organisations are recorded in the Europeana customer relationship management system (CRM), where we store the main information related to them, such as, among others, the official name and English translation, acronym, country of location, and website. Each Europeana organisation entity contains information extracted from the CRM that is augmented with organisation data available in Wikidata. You can retrieve an entity by making the following request:
https://api.europeana.eu/entity/organization/[IDENTIFIER]
Accept: [ACCEPT]https://api.europeana.eu/entity/organization/[IDENTIFIER].[FORMAT]Example:
More information about metadata included in the organisation entity is available here.
Where is semantic enrichment applied?
Semantic enrichment links values in source metadata fields to corresponding Europeana entities for organisations. This process follows a structured approach, where specific metadata fields (source fields) are matched against predefined reference points (target fields) to establish meaningful connections. The enrichment process adheres to a set of rules that define how matches are determined, ensuring consistency and reliability.
Contextual Entity Type | Source fields | Target fields |
|---|---|---|
Organisations | edm:dataProvider edm:intermediateProvider edm:provider | skos:prefLabel skos:altLabel skos:hiddenLabel edm:acronym owl:sameAs |
Use cases
The following use cases demonstrate how matches are established between source metadata and Europeana entity metadata for organisations. Each case outlines the specific matching mechanism used, whether based on textual values or URI (co-)references, and includes an example to illustrate the process in practice.
Use case 1: Matching based on textual values
Enrichment process looks for a textual reference (label) mapped to the source field and finds an organisation entity with the same label in the target field.
Data partners can provide organisation names in their original language, an English translation, or acronyms, as long as these are recorded in the CRM.
Before enrichment:
Source data in provided ore:Aggregation class
Target data in Europeana entity for organisation
After enrichment:
When a match is found, the source value is replaced with the Europeana organisation entity URI and the entity is added to the record. Each entity is an instance of a contextual class as defined in the EDM for representing organisations (foaf:Organization).
Including the foaf:Organization class in the metadata enables the use of additional contextual information while keeping it separate from the Aggregation class.
Use case 2: Matching based on URI (co-)references
Enrichment process looks for a URI mapped to the source field and matches it against the co-reference link (indicated by owl:sameAs relation) available for the organisation entity.
Data partners can provide URIs from external vocabularies or persistent identifiers for organisations. We list some examples below.
To ensure proper enrichment, partners should notify us about the URIs they wish to use so we can record them in our CRM.
Before enrichment:
Source data in provided ore:Aggregation class
Target data in Europeana entity for organisation
After enrichment:
When a match is found, the source value is replaced with the Europeana organisation entity URI and the entity is added to the record as foaf:Organization contextual class.