Providing access to Europe’s digital cultural heritage is Europeana’s core mission. To do so, Europeana has progressively adopted the principles of Linked Data for representing, aggregating and enriching the metadata it collects and is now looking at the emerging web technologies to refine its services. Over the past years we have followed very closely the development of Schema.org and looked into its potential for increasing the visibility of cultural heritage data on the web and their consumption by search engines. We will present a set of recommendations for publishing Europeana metadata using the Schema.org vocabulary and report on the status of implementation. We address 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. We also produce a Schema.org representation of Europeana resources described with the Europeana Data Model (EDM), being the richest as possible and tailored to Europeana’s realities and user needs as well the search engines and their users. In an aggregation context, interoperability with Schema.org can also mean that Europeana can use Schema.org data as a source for its own data services. We will discuss how Schema.org data available in cultural heritage organizations’ websites can be used as a method to provide metadata for ingestion to Europeana and present our first Schema.org harvesting experimentations. |