Aggregation of Linked Data : A case study in the cultural heritage domain

A very large number of online cultural heritage (CH) resources is made available through numerous digital libraries. To address the difficulties of discoverability in CH, the common practice is metadata aggregation, where centralized efforts like Europeana facilitate discoverability by collecting the resources' metadata. In the last years, the CH domain has invested in data models for Linked Data (LD) representation of CH metadata. LD, however, also has potential for innovating metadata aggregation. We present the results of a pilot case study within the Europeana Network. In this pilot, the National Library of The Netherlands plays the role of initial data provider, with the Dutch Digital Heritage Network the one of intermediary service providing datasets to Europeana. We analysed the requirements for an LD aggregation solution and defined a workflow that fulfils the same functional requirements as Europeana's current solution. The workflow was put into practice within the pilot and led to the development of several software components for managing datasets, harvesting LD, data analysis and integration. Our analysis of the experience discusses the effort of adopting such an LD approach for data providers and aggregators, the expertise required by CH data analysts, and the supporting tools required for semantic data.