Building the common European data space for cultural heritage
Sally Chambers, Enno Meijers, Vassilis Tzouvaras, Marie-Véronique Leroi, Kerstin Arnold, Pavel Kats
The common European data space for cultural heritage (Data Space, for short) is one of 14 data spaces initiated by the European Commission. Building on Europeana’s major accomplishments in open data, community building, and data aggregation, it challenges the initiative to grow, innovate, and rethink its approach to cultural heritage data.
The Data Space will become a sustainable and trusted ecosystem for producers and users of European cultural data. It will thrive by building bridges with similar initiatives on various levels: European initiatives such as the SSHOC Marketplace and the European Open Science Cloud and national initiatives such as the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (NDE). Such collaborations with new entities and coordination with local and national initiatives will require a more flexible and adaptive approach to support the inclusion of more diverse types of data. The Data Space will need to embrace a more open and decentralised approach to data sharing to enhance cooperation across the sector and accelerate its digital transformation. Semantic interoperability and technologies like Linked Data and SOLID can be enablers of this change.
