[open-heritage] Europeana factsheet on Open Linked Data

Wed Nov 24 09:49:06 UTC 2010

Hello list,

I've received your discussion on the Europeana fact sheet on Linked Open Data. As one of the authors I would like to respond to the questions you had in that discussion. 

Adrian asked:
In April Europeana already published a "Public Domain Charter"[3]
adressing the licensing of digitized public domain works as Europeana
content. Has there already been any cooperation on open content or an
exchange of ideas between the OKFN and Europeana?
1. There is a collaboration between the OKFN and Europeana. We meet in the COMMUNIA network (Most of us in WG6). Members of the Europeana team that works on the policy documents and technical specifications for Europeana's rights infrastructure, and provider agreements participate in this network.

2. One of our major collaboration with the OKFN is developing public domain calculators. We are developing software tools to help determine the copyright status of a work in many european jurisdictions. We communicate with the OKFN frequently on this subject, for further information see the discussion on pd-discuss at lists.okfn.org or OKFN's wiki.

3. Europeana's Public Domain Charter can also be seen as a continuation of COMMUNIA's work on the Public Domain Manifesto. Europeana continues to search on how to best present work that has fallen in the public domain on her website. For example by being the first major adopter of Creative Commons' Public Domain Mark.

4. We are also exploring matters like http://www.bibliographica.org/ with Rufus Pollock of OKFN, of which I do not have any details at the moment.

I believe these answer the questions Adrian had on Europeana/OKFN.

Ian also raised an interesting point:

IMHO cultural institutions are already well advanced
on the "Open" agenda. The problem for us is that promoting
open-licenses, without being able to easily piggy-back the argument on
"open access" (Lower case intentional) is tricky (And potentially
boring as heck).
4. We also believe that most cultural heritage institutions are sharing some of their metadata in one form or another.This fact sheet on Linked Open Data is part of a more structural approach to get really good Linked Open Data out there. This means in the correct format and with a useable licensing scheme. In the analog world archives and museums are a major authority on the information they hold. This is not true (yet) in the digital world. Europeana is trying to help its partner to establish this position in the digital world as well. 
B.T.W. I believe these complex issues are not boring at all :)

If you have any other questions feel free to contact me, you can also post them to this mailinglist wich I will keep following, I don't know why I didn't subscribe earlier.

Best,

Maarten Zeinstra

Kennisland | Knowledgeland 

T: +31.20.575.6720 | M: +31.6.43.053.919 | S: mzeinstra
www.kennisland.nl | www.knowledgeland.org

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-glam/attachments/20101124/913aea13/attachment-0001.html>