Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

As Semanticweb.com has been writing about, European governments and institutions are heavily investing in the development of the Semantic Web.

One effort that is built using semantic web standards is the Europe portal Europeana.eu, a prototype site billed as a European digital library that will give users direct, multi-lingual access initially to some 2 million digital objects, from film to photos to paintings to manuscripts to archival papers. The site launched November 20, but now it’s a victim of its own popularity: Ten million hits an hour crashed it, and now it’s not due to go live again until mid-December in what is said will be a more robust version.

The Europeana project is expected by 2010 to give users access to more than 6 million digital items, and is ultimately expected to include a business model to ensure the site’s sustainability. According to the web site, “Europeana is a Thematic Network funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus program, as part of the i2010 policy. Originally known as the European digital library network — EDLnet — it is a partnership of 90 representatives of heritage and knowledge organizations and IT experts from throughout Europe. They contribute to the Work Packages that are solving the technical and usability issues and developing the specifications for the prototype.”

The project is run by a core team based in the national library of the Netherlands, and builds on the project management and technical expertise developed by The European Library, the site says. The European Library is a portal that enables people to search across 150 million titles, from 172 collections in 31 European national libraries, and is a service of the Conference of European National Libraries.

Structured metadata is key to contributed content for the portal, which will support RDF triples. Europeana will use the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) harvesting approach. All content aggregators and contributors are required to provide metadata about their resources in unqualified Dublin Core which will be used to build a basic index for simple search, according to the Technical Requirements for providing content. Content aggregators and providers are strongly encouraged to provide more elaborate metadata to enable users to get straight to their content, and so that the portal can build the sophisticated services that users expect, and all data transfer will be based on XML structured files, according to those requirements. Content themes for the prototype include cities, social life, music, crime and punishment, and travel and tourism.

The problems leading to the temporary closure of the site appear to be related to an unexpected level of interest (it had expected up to 5 million hits per hour and reached 13 million hits at its peak), and a lack of computing capacity to support the high traffic. Three servers were online to support the system; these servers deliver contextual information about the digital items, including a small picture. Once users find what they want by searching this contextual information, they click to get to the full content that is stored on the servers of the respective content contributing institutions.

After the site went down for the first time, the Europeana management in The Hague increased computer capacity to deal with 8 million hits per hour,” according to a press release issued on the event. But that wasn’t enough to handle the load, and so “a serious upgrade of computer capacity will be carried out in the coming days and then tested in order to cope with the massive interest from the public.”

Please enter your content here.

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!