The MICHAEL project

The MICHAEL and MICHAEL Plus projects were funded through the European Commission’s eTen programme, to establish a new service for the European cultural heritage.

The MICHAEL project was a partnership between France, Italy and the UK to deploy a cultural portal platform that was developed in France. MICHAEL Plus then extended the MICHAEL project to the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. The two projects are closely aligned. The projects focus on the integration of national initiatives in digitisation of the cultural heritage and interoperability between national cultural portals to promote access to digital contents from museums, libraries and archives.

MICHAEL European portal

The projects have established this international online service, to allow users to search, browse and examine descriptions of resources held in institutions from across Europe. We hope that the technical standards and sustainability model that we have established for the project will mean that more countries will contribute their contents to the portal in future.

The MICHAEL database is based on national inventories of digital resources that have been created by the project partners. Each national inventory includes descriptions of digital collections and the websites, CD-ROMS and other products and services that have been created by museums, libraries and archives. The descriptions are written especially for MICHAEL by people working in, or on behalf of, the cultural institutions themselves. Details are harvested directly from the national inventories to become part of the MICHAEL database for the European services.

At the time of writing, in Spring 2008, there are plans to include in the MICHAEL European Service the national inventories for Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Malta, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Initially three languages were supported (English, French and Italian) but new languages are being added as each national inventory joins the service. By summer 2008 the service should be available in sixteen languages and users will be able to choose their preferred language to search and browse the contents of the MICHAEL database, and also the editorial contents of the website. Records are held in the database in their original language and (partially) in translation. Users are offered access to machine translation tools to enable them to translate record details into the language of their choosing.

In future we hope that more European countries will join and make details of digital resources from their museums, libraries and archives available through the MICHAEL European service.

Technology

The major goal of the MICHAEL project is to build a multilingual inventory of the cultural heritage in Europe. To achieve this data will be gathered from regional and national inventories using a standard software platform and a shared data model.

The MICHAEL software platform consists of two modules that work together to provide data management and publishing services.

• A production module allows users to create, modify, import and manage records that describe aspects of the digital cultural heritage. All of these functions are available using a standard Web browser. Data is stored using a powerful and flexible XML database, which is based on the MICHAEL data model.
• A publication module provides an intuitive interface to enable end-users to search for digital cultural heritage with their Web browser. This module uses a powerful XML search and display engine, which can be customized to allow institutions or countries to adapt the interface to meet their particular needs.

A MICHAEL national instance consists of both a production module and a publication module.

Information services

The two MICHAEL modules act as data repositories that are consistent with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH http://www.openarchives.org/) making metadata available in both standard Dublin Core and MICHAEL format. Records from distributed sources can be gathered into a MICHAEL instance and published together. The MICHAEL European service will make use of these harvesting facilities to bring together the contents developed by the separate national instances.

The MICHAEL publication module includes a REST-based API for searching and retrieving records using simple HTTP requests and XML responses. These facilities will enable other cultural information service providers to incorporate MICHAEL search services within their websites.

Open source software

The MICHAEL platform is being distributed as open source software, and is built on top of other well-known open source components. The most important underlying components of the MICHAEL platform are:

• Apache Cocoon: an XML infrastructure for complex Web applications. It provides a flexible environment based on the separation of concerns between content, logic and style. For the MICHAEL platform, Cocoon provides services such as a robust catching mechanism, XSLT transformations, a server-side scripting environment and a flexible environment for building Web forms, used in the production module for data creation and modification.
• Apache Tomcat is a web container or application server. It implements the Java Servlet and the JavaServerPages (JSP) specifications providing an environment for Java code to run in cooperation with a web server. Tomcat includes its own internal HTTP server.
• Apache Lucene is an indexing and search library developed in Java. It is used in MICHAEL to provide full text indexing and searching.
• eXist: an XML database management system. The database can be accessed by different standard protocols, such as WebDAV, XMLRPC and the xmldb protocol directly from a Cocoon environment. eXist provides a data storage facility, with user and permission management, but also XQuery and Xupdate services to easily manipulate data or to create complex reports.
• SDX: a search engine for large collections of XML documents. Based on the stable and largely used Apache Lucene search engine, SDX provides an easy tool to use API to build search and display services for XML documents, in a Cocoon environment. The MICHAEL publication module is based on HTML templates that make use of this API. SDX supports the OAI-PMH protocol both as a repository and as a harvester.
• Xdepo: a Cocoon environment to manage data stored in an XML database using Web forms forms. Xdepo provides the link between Cocoon, eXist and the Web browser for the MICHAEL platform production module. Xdepo makes it easy to build a Web application based on the powerful functionalities provided by the eXist database management system.

Using Java technologies, the MICHAEL platform can be deployed on wide variety of systems.

MICHAEL Culture AISBL

Michael Culture AISBL (Association Internationale Sans But Lucratif) is a not-for-profit organisation that was founded in 2007, with the aim to continue the MICHAEL European service after the end of the MICHAEL eTEN project. The AISBL has as its mission 'providing services to access cultural digital resources' and 'promoting quality and progress in digitisation of cultural and scientific knowledge and in the creation of on line services'. The association was established under Belgian law, which provides for the creation of international associations.

The statutes of the AISBL have been carefully drawn up to enable members to sustain the MICHAEL service, platform and partnership, and also to cooperate in the development of the European Digital Library.

The Hellenic Ministry of Culture joined the Michael Culture AISBL in May 2008.

Documentation

Greek Michael Plus leaflet (January 2008) General information about the project and its implementation in Greece (in Greek) Download

28 page Michael Plus brochure (September 2007) General information about the project and its partners. All text is available in English. Includes pages about the project in Belgium-Flanders, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom. Download

MICHAEL data model Download

MICHAEL platform Getting Started guide Download

Credits

Hellenic Ministry of Culture
Directorate of Informatics and Telecommunications
www.culture.gr
with contribution by the Directorate of the National Archive of Monuments for terminology and cataloguing

National Technical University of Athens
Image, Video and Multimedia Systems Lab
www.image.ntua.gr