LoCloud D3.7: Report on services developed for local cultural institutions

The LoCloud project is dedicated to providing services for cultural heritage institutions. These services support the easy ingestion of cultural heritage content into Europeana. In addition, the services help content providers capture metadata and enrich the data in order to increase the potential semantic linkage of the data within the World Wide Web. It is one of the major aims of LoCloud to reduce technical, semantic and skills barriers for providing content, and therefore cloud technology is used and cloud-based services have been implemented for facilitating the aggregation of digital content from small and medium cultural institutions.

This deliverable provides a summary status report of the microservices that have been developed for the LoCloud project. Microservices are small, lightweight software services that each perform a set of narrowly defined functions. The various services can be arranged in independently deployable groups and can communicate with each other via defined interfaces. The distributed architecture makes it easier to deploy new versions of services, and to scale the development. In the LoCloud project the development effort for the various services was organized around multiple development teams realizing five main groups of microservices. Among these services are geolocation enrichment tools, metadata enrichment and vocabulary services, historic place names and Wikimedia crowdsourcing services. These microservices can be used and combined as needed by the content providing institutions. All microservices have been implemented on virtual machines in a cloud testlab (using the OpenNebula cloud computing platform) and all services are also integrated in the LoCloud aggregation platform MORe.