Terminology

Owned by Adina Ciocoiu, created
Last updated: Feb 01, 2023
2 min read

This page explains the various terms used frequently across the documentation about EDM and metadata.

For additional definitions of terms used frequently by the Europeana Initiative and across Europeana’s frameworks, consult the Europeana Glossary of Terms.

 

 

Aggregation

The set of related resources in the Europeana system about one particular provided object from one provider. These are either created by the provider or generated from the metadata by the Europeana system.

Class

A group of things that have common properties e.g. Web Resources.

Cultural heritage object (CHO)

The original object that is the focus of the metadata description. It may be either a physical object (painting, book etc) or a digital original.

Literal

A string value with an optional language tag (taken from ISO639), represented in RDF/XML using the xml:lang attribute. (RDF terminology)

Metadata description

This term is used to refer to the package of data about one CHO (i.e. the metadata for the ProvidedCHO, the WebResource, the Aggregation and any associated classes. See also “Record” below.

See also the related term ‘Metadata’ in the Glossary of Terms.

Record

This term is occasionally used as a short-hand means of referring to the package of data about one CHO (i.e. the metadata for the ProvidedCHO, the WebResource, the Aggregation and any associated classes). It is recognised that it is not a term generally employed in the RDF/XML context. See “metadata description” above.

See also the related term ‘Metadata Record’ in the Glossary of Terms.

Reference (“Ref”)

A reference to another object or resource using an identifier for that object or resource (e.g. a URI or local identifier)

Resource

A thing that has identity and which can be the object of descriptions or used in other resources’ description.

Property

An element that expresses the relationship between two resources. Properties can be seen as the attributes or characteristics of a resource.

See also the related term ‘Metadata Field’ in the Glossary of Terms.

Provided object

The cultural heritage object that a provider is submitting data about to Europeana.

ProvidedCHO

The ProvidedCHO is the cultural heritage object which has given rise to and is the subject of the package of data that has been submitted to Europeana. Its properties are those of the original cultural heritage object with a few Europeana-­‐specific ones added. In the modelit is the class of resource thatis the object of the edm:aggregatedCHO statement. There is an exact match between ProvidedCHOs and the items that can appear from a search.

Value

The text or reference that is contained in a Property.

Web Resource

A digital representation of the provided cultural heritage object. See also the related term ‘Digital Object’ in the Glossary of Terms.