OmNom introduction

The goal of the DM2E infrastructure
A major aim of the Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana (DM2E) project is, as the project name already implies, to bring data about digitised manuscripts to Europeana, the European digital library. Europeana gives access to more than 30 million objects coming from 36 countries all over Europe (as of November 2013, see http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/content for the latest figures). These objects represent a large part of Europe’s digitised Cultural Heritage. Europeana collects metadata about the represented objects mainly via national or regional aggregators and projects like DM2E. In order to help data provider bringing their data to Europeana, DM2E has developed its own ingestion tool: OmNom.

What is OmNom and what is its use?
OmNom is used to ingest data with various formats into Europeana by using the DM2E model. The tool can be used online in scope of the DM2E project or downloaded from github. OmNom combines several tools and functionalities that are needed to process mappings from one data format to another and to publish the result as Linked Open Data (LOD). The produced LOD is stored in a triple store and accessible via an open SPARQL endpoint.

Mappings and models
The model that is used to represent the data is a specialisation of the Europeana Data Model (EDM) for manuscripts. The EDM is an RDF-based model that is used to represent Cultural Heritage Objects in Europeana. (To learn more about the EDM, please go to http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/edm-documentation.) These objects are coming from libraries, archives, museums or galleries from all over Europe and are stored in various different formats like e.g. TEI, METS/MODS, MARC or relational databases. As it has to deal with so many different types of content described in different formats, the EDM was created as a very broad and generic model which is very interoperable but cannot describe all aspects that are part of an object’s original metadata record. Therefore, a specialisation of the EDM for manuscripts was created: the DM2E model. It specialises properties and classes of the EDM, especially in (but not limited to) manuscripts-specific aspects.

OmNom build-up
The basic OmNom backend components are used to load data (local or Web files, Mint mappings), to transform data to RDF and to publish the data as LOD. Not only the provided metadata is published as LOD but also provenance data that results from the OmNom workflows themselves: every action in OmNom generates RDF that is stored and can like the provided metadata be processed by others.

The OmNom components can be seen here.