The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB – The German Digital Library)

The German Digital Library’s aim is to make cultural and scientific heritage available to everyone.

Via the Internet, everyone has free access to Germany’s cultural and scientific heritage, i.e. to millions of books, archives, pictures, sculptures, pieces of music and other audio documents, films and sheet music. As a central national portal, the DDB is intended to connect the digital offerings of all German cultural and scientific institutions in the future. The DDB is intended to ensure Germany’s connectivity and competitiveness in science, research and education, but also to make its unique cultural heritage and knowledge conveniently accessible to all via a central point of contact. Central accessibility, in that access to all the information required is created at every PC workstation with an Internet connection, no matter where or when, fundamentally improves the research possibilities in research, teaching and business. Take me to the DDB website.

The central challenge of the German Digital Library is the aggregation and preparation of data from a large number of data providers and the uniform and consistent provision of the data in the DDB portal and for other applications of cultural professionals. For this purpose, a data hub was developed, which enables the harmonization of the metadata and realizes the mapping of the data to a higher-level graph-based data model.

The content is made available centrally via a cross-media search engine with semantic features. For the high-performance management and processing of the data volumes, the DDB relies at its core on data storage in a NoSQL database (Cassandra) and uses Spark for the core processes such as loading, transforming and analyzing data.