Evaluating Data Quality in Europeana: Metrics for Multilinguality

Europeana.eu aggregates metadata describing more than 50 million cultural heritage objects from libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual archives across Europe. The need for quality of metadata is particularly motivated by its impact on user experience, information retrieval and data re-use in other contexts. One of the key goals of Europeana is to enable users to retrieve cultural heritage resources irrespective of their origin and the material’s metadata language. The presence of multilingual metadata descriptions is therefore essential for successful cross-language retrieval. Quantitatively determining Europeana’s cross-lingual reach is a prerequisite for enhancing the quality of metadata in various languages. Capturing multilingual aspects of the data requires us to take into account the full lifecycle of data aggregation including data enhancement processes such as automatic data enrichment. The paper presents an approach for assessing multilinguality as part of data quality dimensions, namely completeness, consistency, conformity and accessibility. We describe the measures defined and implemented, and provide initial results and recommendations.