Metadata Management and Interoperability Support for Natural History Museums. Konstantinos Makris, Giannis Skevakis, Varvara Kalokyri, Polyxeni Arapi and Stavros Christodoulakis

Natural History Museums (NHMs) are a rich source of knowledge about Earth’s biodiversity and natural history. However, an impressive abundance of high quality scientific content available in NHMs around Europe remains largely unexploited due to a number of barriers, such as: the lack of interconnection and interoperability between the management systems used by museums, the lack of centralized access through a European point of reference like Europeana, and the inadequacy of the current metadata and content organization.
The Natural Europe project offers a coordinated solution at European level that aims to overcome those barriers. This paper presents the architecture, deployment and evaluation of the Natural Europe infrastructure allowing the curators to publish, semantically describe and manage the museums’ Cultural Heritage Objects, as well as disseminate them to Europeana.eu and biodiversity networks like BioCASE and GBIF.

In het kader van Europeana en EuroCase.

• Euro-Case The European Council of Academies of Applied Sciences, Technologies and Engineering is an independent non-profit organisation of national academies of Engineering, Applied Sciences and Technology from 21 European countries.

• Biocase , is a transnational network of biological collections of all kinds. BioCASE enables widespread unified access to distributed and heterogeneous European collection and observational databases using open-source, system-independent software and open data standards and protocols.

• GBIF: The Global Biodiversity Information Facility was established by governments in 2001 to encourage free and open access to biodiversity data, via the Internet. Through a global network of countries and organizations, GBIF promotes and facilitates the mobilization, access, discovery and use of information about the occurrence of organisms over time and across the planet.
  
  
  

MMAT architectuur. Werkt met Google Web tool kit. Multi later.
CHO repository

Multimedia authoring tool.
BioCASE Wrapper is speciale software die je moet installeren daarvoor.
Geen support voor non-sql databases.
Er is wel een XML Wrapper.
Ze zijn continu aan het testen en evalueren.
6 musea gebruiken het nu.
16.000 items zitten er in.

Natural europe semantic layer (!)
Dynamische semantic integratie is waar ze verder mee willen gaan.
En crowdsourcing projecten voor natuurwaarnemingen.
Ze hebben al geupgrade naar RDF en is compliant met EDM (European data model)

(zie de sheets)