Evolving LIDO based aggregations into Linked Data

During the last few years digital evolution of the Cultural Heritage field has accelerated rapidly, not least through the aggregation of cultural content into Europeana. In this process the LIDO harvesting schema has been successfully used in many EU projects (ATHENA , JUDAICA and others) due to its ability to support the full range of descriptive information about museum objects. The next step, currently being explored in the Linked Heritage project, is the processing of LIDO metadata in order to publish it on the Web as Linked Data, and connecting it to other Linked Data resources. The aim is to provide a generally valid path for the transfer of data from LIDO XML documents to linked RDF resources. This paper firstly discusses different possible ways that can be used for the RDF representation of LIDO metadata. From this exploration the paper draws some conclusions on the prerequisites and practical steps to be undertaken for successfully evolving LIDO based aggregations into Linked Data. It furthermore presents some preliminary experiments performed for linking resources to external data sources like DBpedia and Eurostat.