Digital Knowledge Store. Organizing Humanities Research Data

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Martin Grötschel, since 12/2015
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2011 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 191420853

The project "Digital Knowledge Store" created a central access to all digital resources of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The outcome is a flexible infrastructure for heterogeneous humanities research data which is well suited for long-term preservation and accessibility. It is a highly robust server application which combines the potential of information retrieval and semantic web technologies with a progressive user interface.The Digital Knowledge Store aims for a depth of analysis that doesn't stop at processing and evaluating metadata and a full-text index. From our point of view the content-focused analysis of the research data by machine processing tools is realizable as well as desirable. So the Digital Knowledge Store is not only prepared for usage but is also implemented in a first version. The abil-ity not only to access research data, but also to intellectually analyze it with regard to implicit knowledge and research intention is the crucial point in the follow-up application for the Digital Knowledge StoreAs far as we know there is neither an equivalent of intellectual coverage of research data in the analog sphere of libraries and archives nor one in the digital sphere of archiving and data centers. Combining the multilingual linguistic annotation, analysis of internal markup of persons, places and events, and the processing of descriptive information on projects and context was a first step in that direction. It is an important and still open task to identify, implement and visualize these steps.So far we have gained important experience which will help to build an extended model of the Digital Knowledge Store. This will result in a product which can be both used freely by other institutions and be installed and run on their servers. Not only the letters of intent but also the current discussions in the area of research data infrastructures show the high demand of such a development.In the next step of the project we will focus on quality assurance of the data already stored in the index and databases. Also the built-in workflows for the current research in the academy will be optimized successively, especially for the semantic interconnections of the research data. They will be applied even more into the daily routine of researching, analyzing and usage of data and can be transferred to other humanities research institutions.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Gerald Neumann
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Günter Stock, until 12/2015