News Story

KMi to Play a Key Role in Shaping the New Cloud-based Europeana Research Platform

Petr Knoth, Tuesday 29 Jan 2013

The eCloud (Europeana Cloud: Unlocking Europe’s Research via The Cloud) project is about to start on the 1st of February 2013. Europeana Cloud is a €4 million project coordinated by the Europeana Foundation, designed to establish a cloud-based system for Europeana and its aggregators. In Europeana Cloud will be new content, new metadata, a new distributed storage system, new tools and services for researchers and a new platform – Europeana Research.

Content providers and aggregators, across the European information landscape, urgently need a cheaper, more sustainable technical infrastructure that is capable of storing both metadata and content. Researchers require a digital space where they can undertake innovative exploration and analysis of Europe’s digitised content. Europeana needs to get closer to the target of 30 million items by 2015.

KMi is the partner with the second highest number of person month (after Europeana Foundation) out of 33 partners. KMi was invited to the project based on our experience in content aggregation and text-mining acquired in the CORE family of projects. Apart from building the eCloud infrastructure, KMi will also be responsible for experimenting with different models for identifying semantically related content from a database of around 30 million objects. This technology will be then provided as a Cloud service.