After a busy first half of 2014, the DM2E project consortium met at the University of Bergen to discuss the progress made, as well as the upcoming final period of the project. Antoine Isaac of Europeana was invited to present the new Europeana strategy as well as to take part in discussing the link between the technical work done in DM2E and Europeana, especially regarding the aggregation, conversion and ingestion of EDM (Europeana Data Model) data into Europeana. Following on several more detailed presentations on the ongoing research in work packages, there was a session devoted to dissemination of the final results, as well as a debate on the future sustainability of DM2E results, one of the focus points for the final period.

The meeting started with presentations on the results of the last six months by each of the four work package leaders. Their slides are included below.

After this overview, Antoine Isaac gave a presentation on the new Europeana strategy, which is focused on transforming from a platform into a multi-sided portal, offering distinctive value to end users, creatives and professionals. This was followed by a discussion on the ingestion of EDM data from DM2E in Europeana.

Another part of the meeting was devoted to more detailed presentations of the ongoing research in work packages 2 and 3, as well as a demonstration of the new functionality of the Pundit tool by Net7. Dominique Ritze presented updates on the contextualisation tool SILK (integrated in Omnom) through which new linkage rules can be defined to create links between Linked Data resources.

Kai Eckert showed the link DM2E has with the recently started DCMI RDF Application Profiles Task Group (RDF-AP). This group deals with the development of recommendations regarding the proper creation of data models, in particular the proper reuse of existing data vocabularies. The DM2E project was a driving factor in establishing the task group, and the DM2E model will be one of the main case studies.

At the end of the meeting, Steffen Hennicke from the Humboldt University reported on the progress of the research into the scholarly domain model related to the digital humanities. This research focuses on questions such as what kinds of ‘reasoning’ digital humanists want to see enabled by the data and information available in Europeana, and which types of operations digital humanists expect to apply to this data. Several experiments related to this task will be running in the final six months of the project.

In addition, some time was reserved for discussing the dissemination of project results in the final period: there are busy months ahead, with six more DM2E-related events being organised between July and December 2014. The first of these will be the Open Data in Cultural Heritage workshop (15 July, Berlin): more information is available here. All other events will be announced through the DM2E website in the near future. We look forward to a busy and fruitful final period!