Evolving the DSpace Storage into Linked Data

The digitalisation of cultural institutions plays an essential role in the conservation and study of the past because through this process the cultural heritage objects are represented in a digital form, thus facilitating their interlinking and discovering new relationships between them and other factors. DSpace is a software system used on wide scale for creating data storages, but, unfortunately, it does not facilitate the creation of new connections between stored metadata, but only their archiving using DC XML Schema as representation method. The solution identified for facilitating the metadata interlinking is represented by their translation in new datasets structured according to EDM so that they can be integrated in Europeana, the largest digital library in Europe. Considering that not all cultural institutions have available the resources to undergo such an effort, the present research suggests the extension of the eCHO Framework with a new feature of translation of metadata structured according to DC XML Schema into Linked Data. Concurrently, this effort is sustained by an analysis of the advantages of the migration of metadata represented through the DC XML Schema into Linked Data.