In the past years, the number of references to places, peoples, concepts and time in Europeana’s metadata has grown considerably and with it new challenges have arisen. These contextual entities are provided as references as part of the metadata delivered to Europeana or selected by Europeana for semantic enrichment or crowdsourcing. However their diversity in terms of semantic and multilingual coverage and their very variable quality make it difficult for Europeana to fully exploit this rich information. Pursuing its efforts towards the creation of a semantic network around cultural heritage objects and intending in this way to further enhance its data and retrieval across languages, Europeana is now working on a long term strategy for entities. The cornerstone of this strategy is a “semantic entity collection” that acts as a centralised point of reference and access to data about contextual entities, which is based on the cached and curated data from the wider Linked Open Data cloud. While Europeana will have to address the technical challenges of integration and representation of the various sources, it will also have to define a content and curation plan for its maintenance. This presentation will highlight the design principles of the Europeana Entity Collection and its challenges. We will detail our plans regarding its curation and maintenance while providing the first examples of its use in Europeana users' services. We will also reflect on how our goals can fit our partners' processes and how can organizations like national cultural heritage portals and smaller institutions contribute to (and benefit from) such a project as a network.