Metadata management, interoperability and Linked Data publishing support for Natural History Museums

Abstract

Natural history museums (NHMs) form 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 such as 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. In this article, we present 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 BioCASE/GBIF. Additionally, we discuss the methodology followed for the transition of the infrastructure to the Semantic Web and the publishing of NHMs' cultural heritage metadata as Linked Data, supporting the Europeana Data Model.