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The Europeana Data Model (EDM), a new way of structuring data that will support Semantic Web searching and let users browse Europeana in revealing new ways, has just been validated by experts from libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual collections.

The EDM will be published in the coming weeks, after final refinements by Antoine Isaac, Europeana's scientific coordinator and semantic web specialist. It represents a significant step forward from the data model that Europeana began with, Europeana Semantic Elements. The linking of data enabled by EDM will put Europeana in the vanguard of semantic web developments.

The successful development of EDM follows Antoine’s selection as co-chair of a key linked data group by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – the organisation renowned for laying the foundations of today's Web by creating standards such as HTML and XML.

The Library Linked Data incubator group set up by W3C aims to unite people involved in semantic web activities and find ways of improving the interoperability of data on the web. It will build on existing initiatives and identify future areas of collaboration.

Antoine is leading the group along with Tom Baker, Chief Information Officer for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, and Emmanuelle Bermes, head of library standards and library data services at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

See Antoine’s slideshow on the EDM. You can also read more on the Library Linked Data incubator group and on W3C.