Hi Mia,
Many thanks for this post. I think the CC0 release by Europeana is a very significant step forward, but it is also important to keep it in context. I suspect that the primary motivation behind the adoption of the CC0 license was the integration of Europeana data into Wikimedia Commons - the ambition being to benefit both from the potential addition of context and knowledge by Wikipedia editors and also to expose the metadata to a wider audience.
It is important to remember that this is explicitly metadata, rather than primary content, and I suspect that this will limit the economic use-cases for the dataset. In our experience, the main audience for cultural metadata is the sector itself (the majority of use of the Culture Grid, for example, is by sector practitioners) and players like OCLC, Google and others who can benefit from mining large quantities of data.
Europeana, as I have always maintained, is an advertising engine for cultural content. It provides a certain kind of upfront experience, but its main purpose is to direct people to the content wherever it is located. I can imagine two kinds of applications emerging from this dataset - those which provide a specific interface which adds value to the metadata (for example, by providing a better search/browse experience) and those which use the metadata to drive or refine other functionality such as Google's Ngram Viewer.
I suspect that end-users, and by implication developers, are going to want to be able to use primary content, and this remains a tension in the model of Europeana as an aggregator of aggregators. It is going to be really interesting to see where people do take the data, and I hope that the current Europeana Awareness project will help inform people about what is possible.
All best,
Nick
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mia
Sent: 12 September 2012 17:22
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Europeana data available for re-use
If you were on this list back in 2008, you might remember long debates about the European Digital Library and whether it would provide access to the content it had collated through APIs... a few years later, Europeana was holding hack days to test its APIs and providing access to the data for selected partners... and finally, now, the data is available to all.
There's more information available on the Press Release: 'Europeana’s huge cultural dataset opens for re-use' http://bit.ly/OqfWZL but here's a short quote:
"For the first time, the metadata is released under the Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Dedication, meaning that anyone can use the data for any purpose - creative, educational, commercial - with no restrictions. This release, which is by far the largest one-time dedication of cultural data to the public domain using CC0 offers a new boost to the digital economy, providing electronic entrepreneurs with opportunities to create innovative apps and games for tablets and smartphones and to create new web services and portals."
I'm really curious to know to what extent this will 'drive growth through digital innovation' or encourage people to create new ways to explore and experience the data...
Cheers, Mia
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