Linked Open Data is a way of publishing structured data that allows metadata to be connected and enriched, so that different representations of the same content can be found, and links made between related resources.

The metadata for all the objects in the Europeana portal is open, in that it is all licensed under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication under the terms of the Data Exchange Agreement (DEA), and can be freely downloaded via the API.

In October 2012, a large subset of this data was transformed into linked data and made available from data.europeana.eu. The data is represented in the Europeana Data Model (EDM). For more information, see our datasets page.

data.europeana.eu started as an experimental pilot  in February 2012 with a small number of data providers who committed at an early stage to Europeana's initiative of promoting more open data. The current version of the pilot contains metadata on 20 million texts, images, videos and sounds gathered by Europeana. They cover a great variety of heritage objects, such as this slovenian version of "O Sole Mio"   from the National Library of Slovenia, or Neil Robson's [memories of the herring business] (http://data.europeana.eu/item/09405f/533F9A826CB038D02C05A9814CF97E5D1B49BBEE) from the Tyne and Wear Archives & Museums.

Linked Open Data - What is it? from Europeana on Vimeo (also in French, German, Italian and Spanish.)

The described resources are each addressable and dereferenceable by their URIs; for instance, http://data.europeana.eu/item/92056/BD9D5C6C6B02248F187238E9D7CC09EAF17BEA59 leads either to an HTML page on the Europeana portal for the object it identifies or to raw, machine-processable data on this object. Please see the technical details and the animation above for background on our motivation.

The data is available in several ways:

• Current pilot datasets All Europeana datasets can be explored and queried through an experimental SPARQL endpoint provided by Ontotext at europeana.ontotext.com

Dump files for the entire Europeana dataset can be downloaded at the datasets page. This dataset is served according to the Linked Data recipes.

• First experimental datasets The original pilot subset contains 2.4 million objects from 8 direct Europeana providers encompassing over 200 cultural institutions from 15 countries. This subset of data was [released] (http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/press-release?p_p_id=itemsindexportlet_WAR_europeanaportlet_INSTANCE_8k5F&p_p_lifecycle=1&p_p_state=normal&p_p_mode=view&p_p_col_id=column-2&p_p_col_pos=1&p_p_col_count=2&_itemsindexportlet_WAR_europeanaportlet_INSTANCE_8k5F_itemId=994900&_itemsindexportlet_WAR_europeanaportlet_INSTANCE_8k5F_javax.portlet.action=setItemId) on 17 February 2012. The project has been described in a paper presented at the Dublin Core 2011 conference.

Disclaimer: data.europeana.eu is currently in a pilot stage, and can thus be changed at any moment! Your feedback is more than welcome, and may lead to updates in the prototype service.

If you have any questions or feedback, contact us at europeana-lod@googlegroups.com