Welcome to the LinBi project!

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Between 2019-2020, the CEF-INEA project LinBi focused upon Europe’s biodiversity content. This content reflects the enormous variety of life on earth, as depicted in books, illustrations, specimen scans, photographs, sound recordings and video.

LinBi helped to bring together research and the general public. The goal was to introduce research material to new users and re-users, such as students and nature enthusiasts, broadcasters, politicians, industry, SMEs and education providers. LinBi was an important step in providing access to biodiversity content for new user communities.

LinBi bridged the information gap by providing new ways of using biodiversity content. By linking information objects, the LinBi enrichment platform connects Europe’s biodiversity material with existing content. All LinBi data items is processed by the OpenUp! natural history aggregator and delivered to Europeana.

TECHNICAL OVERVIEW

LinBi created a data enrichment platform to link existing items of data with new items, creating ‘enriched’ information objects. These enriched objects were processed by the OpenUp! Natural History content aggregator and delivered to Europeana.

Linking is the process of establishing that various objects have something in common, whether through high-level definitions (‘tree’, ‘flower’, ‘frog’, ‘dog’ etc.) or by using more specific details such as plant classification, scientific name, creator’s name/s, geolocation and more. The platform will support the creation of new classifications using simple vocabularies. Based on common terms, these simple wordlists will enable the use of everyday language in the discovery of natural history content described on a scientific level.

In this way, content linking will connect selected objects with related objects in various formats including film snippets, illustrations, images and audio. In addition, the LinBi enrichment platform will create new information objects containing all information relating to a specific Moment of Interest (MoI, for a film/audio snippet) or Region of Interest (RoI, for an image/text section). As a proof of concept, LinBi will provide 15,000 objects to Europeana via the enrichment platform.

NETWORKS

LinBi prepared the way for a standardised process of ingesting enriched objects to Europeana. LinBi approached existing Europeana aggregators to propose collaborations on interlinking existing Europeana objects. LinBi also investigated means of including the enrichment platform into Europeana Core services for all aggregators.

IMPACT

Thousands of paintings, pictures, audio, video and other multimedia data in Europeana depict aspects of biodiversity. Linking these objects to existing natural heritage data creates an enhanced user experience and supports increased discovery and use of the content.

LinBi introduced 1.3 million new data items from the biodiversity and natural history domains into Europeana. This new content included scanned herbarium sheets, illustrations, nature sounds and video/film recordings, all relating to various biodiversity topics.

ARCHITECTURE

LinBi added a new enrichment component to the existing OpenUp! Natural History content aggregator for Europeana. With this component, biodiversity data can be linked to other cultural heritage information, putting the data in context and enhancing visibility and re-use for a variety of user groups.

LINKS

KEYWORDS

biodiversity, cultural heritage, species diversity, habitat diversity, Nagoya Protocol, cultural services, Europeana, data enrichment, natural history, botanical drawings, vocabularies, digital library, herbarium collections,  botanical illustration,  natural history, digital libraries, natural sciences, outreach, digital heritage, metadata enrichment

CONTACT

Email: info@linbi.eu

Co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union