LoCloud aims to build on the achievements of CARARE in establishing a repository-based aggregator for Archaeological and Architectural heritage and of Europeana Local in its work with local institutions and their regional and national aggregators, which resulted in the contribution to date of well over 5 million items to Europeana.

The main goals of LoCloud are:

• to continue to ease the task of enabling heritage organizations in making their contents accessible via Europeana, by using cloud technologies to provide services and tools which help to reduce technical, semantic and skills barriers,
• to facilitate aggregation of digital content from small and medium cultural institutions, to be made available to Europeana,
• to enable smaller institutions such as house-museums to contribute their content to Europeana,
• to explore the potential of cloud computing for aggregation, enrichment and re-use, with a special focus on geographic location.

In LoCloud, DCU is responsible for:

• evaluating and appraising content and metadata among collections participating in LoCloud, as well as developing a metadata sourcing strategy and plan,
• designing technical specifications of the core infrastructure components,
• specifying and carrying out necessary developments in the existing MoRe aggregation service (store.carare.eu) sufficient to enable ingestion, data management and continued delivery to Europeana,
• analyzing and enriching the metadata being provided to Europeana, with the implementation of the Natural Language Processing (NPL) tools, as well as including the enriched content into the repository,
• developing an application to enable local cultural institutions to collaborate in the development of a historical place name gazetteer, and to enrich the harvested/ingested metadata,
• developing and hosting a portal facility for small and medium sized content providers and aggregators

Original location: http://www.locloud.eu/