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The aim of the task reported in this Deliverable 4.3 was to explore how we could arrive at shared metadata enrichment, by making the most of the large amount of data already gathered in Europeana and the Cloud environment developed in the project. We explored whether we could enrich the data by comparing Europeana data with data from external sources (task 4.3.1). Secondly, we explored whether there was data internally in the large Europeana set that could meaningfully be connected to other data in the set (task 4.3.2). Both approaches would offer better contextualisation of Europeana data for the end user. In Task 4.3.1, ISTI­CNR demonstrated the use of image recognition techniques to explore possible overlap between the datasets of Europeana and the WikiArt data set. As a side effect, it showed that duplicates within the Europeana data set might also surface. The pilot showed how information from an external resource such as WikiArt can potentially be used to enrich the data that is already held in Europeana. A second test phase in February 2016 will increase the Europeana and WikiArt datasets, ensure a more precise selection and focus on paintings held in Europeana, improve matching against WikiArt, and enhance performance.

The report presents the work carried out over seven months in 2015, during which our group has: - inventoried relevant semantic enrichment work in the Europeana Network in the past years. We have tried to do this in a way that we hope will facilitate identification and use of services relevant to the application that needs them. This includes general considerations on the diversity of the processes at hand and a focus on interoperability issues. - further developed criteria to select datasets for semantic enrichment and illustrate with a thorough analysis of selected examples - explored methodological issues for the evaluation of semantic enrichment services - performed a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of seven enrichment services on a same subset of the Europeana dataset, containing 17.300 records. This report, together with its two companion documents and a data space on the Europeana Assembla, presents all this. We have also included, as a conclusion, a number of lessons learned we think should be considered for the design and enhancement of enrichment services as well as for their evaluation.

The paper presents an overview of the user generated content service that the ASSETS Best Practice Network has designed, implemented and evaluated with the user for Europeana, the European digital library. The service will allow Europeana users to contribute to the contents of the digital library in several different ways, such as uploading simple media objects along with their descriptions, annotating existing objects, or enriching existing descriptions. The user and the system requirements are outlined first, and used to derive the basic principles underlying the service. A conceptual model of the entities required for the realization of the service and a general sketch of the system architecture are also given, and used to illustrate the basic workflow of some important operations.

In the wide public Europeana is primarily perceived as a portal exposing a great amount of cultural heritage information. Even though this perception is not entirely misleading, the main goal of Europeana rather is to build an open services platform enabling users and cultural institutions to access and manage a large collection of surrogate objects representing digital and digitised content via an Application Program Interface (API). The paper covers some details of the overall data space schema, of the API description and of the Europeana Portal implementation; it also discusses use cases and the mental approach that users, in particular cultural institutions, should adopt to completely exploit the potential of the Europeana services platform together with a discussion of related risks.