Kulturarvsdata Swedish Open Cultural Heritage (SOCH)

Overview

Kulturarvsdata, known in English as the Swedish Open Cultural Heritage (SOCH) and in Swedish as K-samsök, is a national aggregator of cultural heritage data developed and maintained by the Swedish National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet). The service harvests metadata from the databases of cultural heritage institutions across Sweden, indexes and links that data, and publishes it via an open API so that third parties can build applications and explore it in new ways.

History and Founding

The Swedish National Heritage Board received its assignment to develop SOCH from the Swedish government in 2008, and the service has been in active operation since then. The platform was designed to realize FAIR data principles—making heritage information findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. SOCH also acts as Sweden's national aggregator for the Europeana platform, contributing millions of records to European cultural heritage discovery.

Collections and Holdings

SOCH aggregates metadata from a broad network of institutions, ranging from national museums and regional archives to local non-profit organizations. Collections include artefacts, artworks, biological specimens, historical buildings, ancient manuscripts, film recordings, runic inscriptions, churches, and crowdsourced information about cultural-historical sites. The platform holds metadata for more than 10 million objects. SOCH also incorporates data from the Historic Environment Record, covering ancient and historical sites and archaeological projects.

Access and Usage

SOCH data is freely accessible via a web API under various Creative Commons licenses. The primary public search interface is Kringla (kringla.nu), which enables full-text search across all aggregated collections. Developers can integrate the SOCH API to build custom applications. Local node software is available for both Microsoft and Java platforms to facilitate data provider participation.