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Abstract

"Europeana.eu is about ideas and inspiration. It links you to 6 million digital items." This is the opening statement taken from the Europeana WWW-site (http://www.europeana.eu/portal/aboutus.html), and it clearly is concerned with the mission of Europeana - without, however, being over-explicit as to the precise nature of that mission. Europeana's current logo, too, has a programmatic aspect: the slogan "Think Culture" clearly again is related to Europeana's mission and at same time seems somewhat closer to the point: 'thinking' culture evokes notions like conceptualisation, reasoning, semantics and the like. Still, all this remains fragmentary and insufficient to actually clarify the functional scope and mission of Europeana. In fact, the author of the present contribution is convinced that Europeana has too often been described in terms of sheer quantity, as a high volume aggregation of digital representations of cultural heritage objects without sufficiently stressing the functional aspects of this endeavour. This conviction motivates the present contribution on some of the essential functional aspects of Europeana making clear that such a contribution - even if its author is deeply involved in building Europeana - should not be read as an official statement of the project or of the European Commission (which it is not!) - but as the personal statement from an information science perspective! From this perspective the opening statement is that Europeana is much more than a machine for mechanical accumulation of object representations but that one of its main characteristics should be to enable the generation of knowledge pertaining to cultural artefacts. The rest of the paper is about the implications of this initial statement in terms of information science, on the way we technically prepare to implement the necessary data structures and functionality and on the novel functionality Europeana will offer based on these elements and which go well beyond the 'traditional' digital library paradigm. However, prior to exploring these areas it may be useful to recall the notion of 'knowledge' that forms the basis of this contribution and which in turn is part of the well known continuum reaching from data via information and knowledge to wisdom.