Subject Infrastructure: Integration with Europeana and Multilingual Support
Description ECLAP portal provides access to a wide range of content on the performing arts field. This report provides information about aspects related to:
•integration with Europeana
•multilingual into the metadata and queries
•accessibility of the portal and of the other ECLAP tools.
The integration with Europeana is a key aspect and it allows ECLAP content to be accessible from the Europeana portal. The production of content from ECLAP to Europeana is one of the main goals of the project. Europeana acquires metadata for indexing from providers as single files and also using an OAI-PMH based interface. About the metadata modelling Europeana recently passed from the flat model (ESE) to the richer model called EDM. ECLAP metadata are mapped to EDM, and the report describes how this process has been performed and it is possible. ECLAP has successfully provided the planned number of content to Europeana and the procedures set up in the ECLAP back office allowed to stimulate the ECLAP content providers to produce the metadata for Europeana with the needed level of quality and details.
The multilingual aspects are addressed in ECLAP with the aim of enriching the metadata and improving the quality of experience in query them. To this end, ECLAP has tested the possibility of using some metadata translation tool with the aim of providing a first fast draft of the metadata translation to the experts. They are the only one authorized to validated metadata and pass them to Europeana. This is just an option, since the request of automated translation can be performed only by authorized delegated personnel that should return to the content to polish and validate the performed translations by using the ECLAP Metadata Editor. The results reported in other deliverable shown that the usage of this kind of tools has been limited with respect to the globality of ECLAP content and significant only for the featured content which are promoted in the first page of ECLAP.
The accessibility of the major ECLAP tools has been assessed, namely: the ECLAP portal, the Content organizer tool to access at ECLAP via mobiles, and the MINT tool for metadata ingestion and mapping. The guidelines applied have been conformant to the W3C. The results reported in this document are referring to the version of the tools in April 2013. The general assessment has demonstrated that the tools are satisfactory and only minor changes have been requested. In some cases, they cannot be applied without compromising the visual aspects of the performing arts performances. Recently a new round of improvements on the mentioned tools has also solved a part of the minor problems identified. The list of those improvements are reported in http://www.eclap.eu/130961 and in App.5