MIF and Europeana Inside

ELAG 2014

Metadata Interoperability Framework (MIF)
Naeem Muhammad, Software Architect at LIBIS KULeuven and Sam Alloing, Business Consultant at LIBIS KULeuven, Belgium

Made for Europeana inside. This is a technical project with different partners, content providers and software providers. It's to create a better integration of the different content in Europeana. So the goal is to create a component that developers of the different systems can directly add into their content management system and it will talk to Europeana. End of this project planned in Sept. 2014.

The content is enriched by Europeana and the content providers can get it back. This is still in discussion and development. The enriched metadata is not always correct so there are still issues to resolve.

ECK=Europeana Connection Kit. Technical providers use this to transform and push data to Europeana. The ECK local is the part to be integrated in the local system itself. Core ECK services include:

• Metadata definintion
• Set Mangaer
• Statistics
• PID generation
• Preview service
• Validation of metadata
• Data push (Sword) / data pull (OAI-PMH) because some content providers would rather push the data to Europeana rather than them taking it but Europeana is afraid of compabtibility issues so the data pull is still the one in use
• Mapping and Transformation

LibisCoDe (L content delivery to Europeana) is the tool used (?) for content providers to put their data in. It is then sent to Europeana. It will be developed in a way that users can decide what data they want to take back from Europeana.

Mapping and Transformation supports MARC to EDM and LIDO to EDM because that's what used in Europeana. LIDO =XML fomrat used by museums, EDM=RDF format from Europeana. So the input has to be MARC XML or LIDO. The output is only EDM at the moment. There are core classes and additional classes. EDM uses Dublin Core. For MARC, it works like this:
[command],[marc tag + subfield],[edm field], e.g. COPY, marc506a,dc:rights
doesn't use indicators at this moment, it could change.

Commands are: COPY, APPEND, SPLIT, COMBINE (multiple source fields can be combined in one target field), LIMIT (to limit the number of characters in a field), PUT, REPLACE, CONDITION (combine different actions and use a conditional flow; can be used with IF.

The plan is that EDM has to be as easy for users as possible, even though some understanding will help. The important is to know the EDM field, not the format.

It's a wservice, so no user interface. Meant to be integrated in CMS or use a REST client. Parameters: records (can be a zip file, XML), mappingRulesFile, sourceFormat (LIDO or MARC), targetFormat (EDM)

Future: add input formats, such as csv, filemaker xml, some custom xml etc. Update/add output formats (add EDM contextual classes, other formats...), extend/add update actions, add queuing (near future), add mapping interface (or integrate with  MINT, another Europeana project for mapping)