Linking European Television Heritage

EUscreen represents all major European television archives and acts as a key aggregator providing audiovisual content to Europeana. The project aims at the creation of an online collection of representative television programmes, secondary sources of information and articles, facilitating access to students, scholars and the general public. The multidisciplinary dimension of the project is mirrored in the composition of the socio-technical nature of the consortium composed of 20 audiovisual collection owners, technology providers, legal experts, educational technologists and media historians from 20 European countries. The main technical goals of EUscreen are to (i) implement and operate a state-of-the-art workflow for content ingestion, (ii) provide a front-end that accommodates requirements of several user groups.

Metadata aggregation is implemented through the MINT platform (http://euscreen.image.ntua.gr/euscreen). MINT facilitates the ingestion, semantic alignment and aggregation of metadata records. It also implements a variety of remediation approaches. Interoperability is achieved on the basis of a well established harvesting schema, for which EUScreen uses the EBUCore metadata set as a conceptual reference model (http://tech.ebu.ch/lang/en/MetadataEbuCore). EBUCore interoperability is strongly maintained with respect to W3C developments through EBU’s active participation in the development of the Media Annotation ontology.

The EUscreen project (http://euscreen.eu) has recently taken steps to expand its scope to provide unified access to large integrated digital collections related to European television history. By supporting the Linking Open Data W3C community project and by signing the new Europeana Data Exchange Agreement, the material  is made accessible through the EUscreen platform and becomes more widely searchable, findable, linkable, and accessible. It is therefore more connected to the world wide web, its users and the machines that link them together. With the aggregation model in place, EUScreen was all set for an easier implementation of the Linked Data principles, which permit the interpretation and interlinking of  EUScreen data with various sources of information also outside of the EUscreen domain. EBUCore provides mappings to all known audiovisual metadata standards and the respective ontology was used to formalise  and serialise metadata in the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which is now published by EUScreen as Linked Open Data.

More specifically, the first step was to map the harvesting EUscreen schema to the EBUcore ontology. The second step was to perform internal and external linking of the data set, initially using , specific elements of the harvesting schema relating items. Values of elements like location and language were linked, and used to discover potentially interesting relevant external resources. The first outcome of this process was the linking of EUScreen’s video content and metadata to the DBpedia, Eurostat, Freebase and NY Times data sources (http://lod.euscreen.eu/).

The paper discusses the reasoning behind the workflow, the set-up and overview of the process and how these technical developments effectively improve access to our shared television history to students, teachers and the general audience. The ongoing operation on Linked Data publication and consumption within the project and especially the participation of television archives in its validation is also being discussed as an important and new aggregation task.