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Sterna

The Sterna project was developed by Naturalis and Trezorix and is partly funded by the European Commission's eContentPlus program. The project is affiliated with the European Digital Library (Europeana).

The goal of the project is to develop best practices in the field of dynamic and multilingual knowledge systems that make use of dispersed sources with a multitude of different data models.

Sterna is short for Semantic web-based Thematic European Reference Network Application. The theme of the project is "birds" and the content that is provided by the various partners varies from scientific data and articles to illustrations, photographs film clips and sound recordings.

Thirteen European organizations participate in Sterna, which are mostly active in the field of biodiversity and natural history:

  • Archipelagos, Greece
  • DOPPS BirdLife, Slovenia
  • Heritage Malta
  • Hungarian Natural History Museum
  • Icelandic Institute of Natural History
  • Natural History Museum of the municipality of Amaroussion, Greece
  • Natural History Museum of Luxemburg
  • Naturalis, the Netherlands
  • Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
  • Royal Museum for Central Africa, Belgium
  • Salzburg Research, Austria
  • Teylers Museum, the Netherlands
  • Wildscreen/ARKive, UK

In Sterna the RNA architecture is applied to create a findability layer that enables the project partners to disclose their various kinds of content in their own language. This RNA environment has been modelled in a way that the many taxonomical data can be retrieved in a sound scientific manner. At the same time the model has enough flexibility to integrate the many other kinds of content in Sterna, such as photographs, audiovisuals, sound recordings and rare bird drawings from antique books.

To be able to import all of these collections in the RNA environment and connect them to each other several generic and customized conversion methods have been developed. The RNA Toolset is used to maintain and further extend the findability layer and to create structured and textual content.

See also www.sterna-net.eu

 

 
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