Television Heritage and the Semantic Web: Video Active and EUscreen

Many audiovisual archives are in the process of digitising their material and are exploring the new possibilities this brings to publish their content online. This paper provides insight into the background and development of the award winning Video Active Portal (thousands of video items are accessible through www.videoactive.eu) and its successor EUscreen; initiatives offering access to television heritage material from archives across Europe. The Video Active project has used the latest advances in Semantic Web technologies in order to provide expressive representation of the metadata, mapping heterogeneous metadata schema in a common metadata schema based on Dublin Core, and advanced query services. As one of the main outcomes, the project successfully integrated their data to Europeana. The work of Video Active will be continued in the EUscreen Best Practice Network, to be launched in September 2009. In this three-year project, more fine-grained access to video objects will be provided for, using the EBU Core Set of Metadata, released by the EBU metadata working group at the end of 2008. In this report, the authors will firstly outline the work done in Video Active and will elaborate on the architecture of EUscreen that will expand the possibilities for connecting data across cultural heritage organizations in a meaningful way.