Case Study: Europeana achieves fast, connected search across millions of European artworks with Neo4j

Neo4j Helps Make Millions of European Artworks & Cultural Objects Accessible to All

Europeana Foundation, co-founded with the European Commission, has catalogued more than 53 million European paintings, books, recordings and other cultural objects from over 3,000 institutions to make Europe’s heritage searchable online. The organization needed to surface the many connections between artifacts (for example, all works by the same artist) but found traditional databases too memory‑intensive and slow to traverse for this highly connected data.

In 2014 Europeana adopted Neo4j’s graph database to model and traverse relationships efficiently; today over 6 million records (about 12% of its holdings) are in Neo4j, powering “Similar Items,” Explore features and online exhibitions. The change improved record quality and user experience, sped up searches, promoted partner institutions to a global audience, and supports roughly 250,000 visitors and 1 million page views per month.

Europeana

Yorgos Mamakis

System Architect