The European Cultural Backbone (ECB) is a media data space within the Display network, enabling automated metadata exchange among partners through Repco, an open-source software. This ecosystem facilitates cross-platform content search and recommendation, maintaining content accountability. The ECB aims to foster a pan-European dialogue by pooling resources and promoting shared values across journalistic outlets and media platforms.
cba.media/building-a-european-cultural-backbone
Display Europe is a collaborative federation inviting media outlets, journalists, and community media participants dedicated to fostering cross-border narratives and pan-European dialogue. It offers a platform for partners to showcase curated content, guided by principles of diversity, inclusion, and journalistic integrity. Display Europe emphasizes the amplification of marginalized voices and the promotion of democracy, human rights, and social justice through its federated editorial material.
Joining the ECB network provides media professionals with access to a broad, collaborative platform for sharing and discovering content across Europe. Benefits include enhanced content reach through interconnected search and recommendation engines, participation in a democratic governance structure, and adherence to high journalistic standards. Partners gain the opportunity to amplify diverse voices, engage in pan-European dialogues, and contribute to a more inclusive representation of Europe's cultural and social landscape.
To be part of our network and thus share content and reach audiences Europe-wide, you can participate in our cross-platform search that is included in our partner sites.
Our metadata aggregator Repco (Replication & Collector) can ingest and index your website (metadata of your articles and media files) using an RSS Feed. Get to know more about the technical requirements and how you can include the search function on your site too.
For Wordpress users: Just install our plugin to make your RSS Feeds compatible with Repco.
Click here to download
The feed must provide a pagination function that lets you list items of a feed page per page.
Preferably this should be done by the GET parameters ‘offset’ and ‘limit’, whereas ‘offset’ describes the position to start at and ‘limit’ the number of items to be included on the current page, e.g.
Show the first 100 items:
?offset=1&limit=100
Show items from 100 – 200:
?offset=100&limit=100
In order the search engine can update modified items properly the feed has to be sortable by modification date. This can be done either by default or by giving a ?orderby= parameter, like:
?orderby=modified_date
Note: Wordpress natively supports sorting by modification date
In the end, a feed URL needs to provide the combination of all GET parameters like:
https://url.to/my-feed?offset=1&limit=100&orderby=modified_date
The channel’s language must be set correctly, e .g. <language>en</language>
See the list of 2 character language codes
The <description> tag of the item needs to contain the article’s full text.
A featured image should be provided for each item that can be used as a thumbnail.
<image>
<url>https://url.com/myimage.jpg</url>
</image>
<media:thumbnail> tag like:
<media:thumbnail url="https://url.com/myimage.jpg" />
<media:thumbnail>, don’t forget to include the corresponding namespace in the <rss> tag:
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/">
If your feed contains different languages, items must have an <xml:lang> tag to indicate the item’s language, e.g.:
<xml:lang>en</xml:lang>
See the list of 2 character language codes
To include the ECB's search function into your Wordpress site, simply install the widget we provide: Download here
Another way to integrate the search function into your site is to use the Repco GraphQL API directly. See the technical documentation.
ECB PREREQUISITES TEXT MISSING