The Code4Lib Journal – Recommendations for the application of Schema.org to aggregated Cultural Heritage metadata to increase relevance and visibility to search engines: the case of Europeana

"Europeana provides access to more than 54 million cultural heritage objects through its portal Europeana Collections. It is crucial for Europeana to be recognized by search engines as a trusted authoritative repository of cultural heritage objects. Indeed, even though its portal is the main entry point, most Europeana users come to it via search engines.

Europeana Collections is fuelled by metadata describing cultural objects, represented in the Europeana Data Model (EDM). This paper presents the research and consequent recommendations for publishing Europeana metadata using the Schema.org vocabulary and best practices. Schema.org html embedded metadata to be consumed by search engines to power rich services (such as Google Knowledge Graph). Schema.org is an open and widely adopted initiative (used by over 12 million domains) backed by Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex, for sharing metadata across the web It underpins the emergence of new web techniques, such as so called Semantic SEO.

Our research addressed the representation of the embedded metadata as part of the Europeana HTML pages and sitemaps so that the re-use of this data can be optimized.

The practical objective of our work is to produce a Schema.org representation of Europeana resources described in EDM, being the richest as possible and tailored to Europeana’s realities and user needs as well the search engines and their users."