The EAGLE Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy: a technical perspective

The project EAGLE (Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy, a Best Practice Network partially funded by the European Commission) aims at aggregating epigraphic material provided by some 15 different epigraphic archives (about 80% of the classified epigraphic material from the Mediterranean area) for ingestion to Europeana. The collected material will be made available also to the scholarly community and to the general public, for research and cultural dissemination. This paper briefly presents the main services provided by EAGLE and the challenges encountered for the aggregation of material coming from heterogeneous archives (different data models and metadata schemas, and exchange formats). EAGLE has defined a common data model for epigraphic information, into which data models from different archives can be optimally mapped. The data infrastructure is based on the D-NET software toolkit, capable of dealing with data collection, mapping, cleaning, indexing, and access provisioning through web portals or standard access protocols.