Data interoperability and curation: the European Film Gateway Experience

Film archives, containing collections of cinema-related digital material, have been created in many European countries. Today, the EC Best Practice Network Project EFG (European Film Gateway) provides a single access point to 59 collections from 19 archives and across 14 European countries, for a total of 640,000 digital objects. This paper illustrates challenges and solutions in the realization of the EFG data infrastructure. These mainly concerned the curation and interoperability issues derived by the need of aggregating metadata from heterogeneous archives (different data models, hence metadata schemas, and exchange formats). EFG designed a common data model for movie information, onto which archives data models can be optimally mapped. It realizes a data infrastructure based on the D-NET software toolkit, capable of dealing with data collection, mapping, cleaning, indexing, and access provision through web portals or standard access protocols. To achieve its objectives EFG has extended D-NET with advanced tools for data curation.