data.europeana.eu: The Europeana Linked Open Data Pilot

data.europeana.eu is an ongoing effort of making Europeana metadata available as Linked Open Data on the Web. It allows others to access metadata collected from Europeana data providers via standard Web technologies. The data are represented in the Europeana Data Model (EDM) and the described resources are addressable and dereferencable by their URIs. Links between Europeana resources and other resources in the Linked Data Web will enable the discovery of semantically related resources. We developed an approach that allows Europeana data providers to opt for their data to become Linked Data and converts their metadata to EDM, benefiting from Europeana efforts to link them to semantically related resources on the Web. With that approach, we produced a first Linked Data version of Europeana and published the resulting datasets on the Web. We also gained experiences with respect to EDM, HTTP URI design, and RDF store performance and report them in this paper.