Easing the Creation of Mappings between Metadata Formats

Being able to exchange metadata is the key to ensuring access to collections, establishing interoperability among collections, and between different types of cultural heritage institutions, such as across libraries, museums and audiovisual archives. Motivated by two use cases, one for audiovisual archives and one for museums and general archives, we present an approach for automating mapping between different metadata formats. The mapping approach uses an intermediate ontology and formalises the relations to each of the metadata formats supported. An intuitive web-based configuration user interface is provided in order to build and customise mappings. Based on the two use cases, we discuss two ways of applying the mapping approach: as a web service, which can be included in processes of an audiovisual archive's preservation system and integrating of the generated mapping instructions into collection management applications for museums and archives. The proposed approach reduces the effort for defining metadata conversions. It thus allows overcoming interoperability issues between cultural heritage institutions and facilitates content provision to portals like Europeana and Archives Portal Europe.