Europeana announced that the Europeana Data Model (EDM) has just been published. It is a new way of structuring the data that Europeana will be ingesting, managing and publishing. The EDM is a major improvement on the Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE), the basic data model used from the beginning of Europeana.

The new data model has been developed by members of Europeana v1.0, EuropeanaConnect and experts from academic and cultural circles. Also, the EDM has been validated by technical specialists at libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual collections. However, the data model is still under development and it will be refined until the end of 2010. The EDM is compatible with the ESE and no data will need to be resubmitted.

Detailed information can be found in the EDM Primer and Definition of the EDM Elements.

If you are interested in the new data model, you can consider participation in two free of charge events: the Europeana Open Culture Conference (14-15 Oct, Amsterdam) and Europeana Day (19 Oct, Poznań).