The Cultural Heritage (CH) community is one of the most active in the realisation of Aggregative Data Infrastructures (ADIs). ADIs provide tools to integrate data sources to form uniform and richer information spaces. The realisation of ADIs for CH must be based on technology capable of coping with complex interoperability issues and sustainability issues. In this poster, we present the D-NET software toolkit framework and services, devised for the realisation of sustainable and customisable ADIs.
In particular, we demonstrate the effectiveness of D-NET in the CH scenario by describing its usage in the realisation of a real-case ADI for the EC project EAGLE (Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy, a Best Practice Network partially funded by the European Commission).
Epigraphic archives, containing collections of editions about ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions, have been created in several European countries during the last couple of centuries. Today, the project EAGLE provides a single access point for the content of about 15 epigraphic archives, totaling about 1,5M digital objects. This poster illustrates some of the challenges encountered and their solution for the realization of the EAGLE data infrastructure. The challenges mainly concern the harmonization, interoperability and service integration issues caused by the aggregation of metadata from heterogeneous archives (different data models and metadata schemas, and exchange formats). EAGLE has defined a common data model for epigraphic information, into which data models from different archives can be optimally mapped. The EAGLE data infrastructure is capable of dealing with data collection, mapping, cleaning, indexing, and access provisioning through web portals or standard access protocols.

Link: http://aiucd2017.aiucd.it/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/book-of-abstract-AIUCD-2017.pdf