FAIR.rdm - FAIR Management of African Archaeological Research Data

• Applicants: Professorin Dr.-Ing. Brigitte Mathiak; Professorin Dr. Eleftheria Paliou, since 9/2023
• Subject Area: Prehistory and World Archaeology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 467208261

The project aims at facilitating and supporting research data management (RDM) in the projects of the DFG Priority Programme “Entangled Africa: Inner African relations between the rainforest and the Mediterranean, around 6000 – 500 years ago” (SPP 2143). The project will provide tangible support by offering consultations and archaeological as well as technical data curation. The composition of the project team guarantees experienced research data management as well as discipline-specific data stewardship.The work of the project is firmly based on the FAIR principles, established best practices, and a strategic orientation towards the emergent national research data infrastructures (NFDIs). While the archaeological perspective unites the multidisciplinary priority programme, several projects also feature interdisciplinary approaches. Together with these projects, the RDM project will explore strategies and adequate options to enhance the interoperability and visibility of interdisciplinary data. Besides the FAIR principles, the RDM project will also explore the suitability and applicability of the CARE principles of collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics for the data of the SPP. All activities will be developed and implemented in close collaboration with the other SPP projects.The project will translate the requirements from the FAIR and CARE principles into specific and needs-oriented improvements of the SPP’s data practices and will situate these practices in the emerging NFDIs. The project will continue to advance the efforts of the relevant NFDI initiatives, particularly by reporting experiences from using services back into the infrastructure, by contributing workflows and tools as well as RDM related materials produced throughout the project. The infrastructural base of the project's agenda is the tight embedding within the digital service structures of the iDAI.world. In addition to specialized services for geospatial (iDAI.gazetteer) and chronological (iDAI.chronontology) data, these are platforms for data integration (iDAI.objects/Arachne) and general repositories (IANUS). Founded on this reliable infrastructure, the RDM-project will support the other projects during all stages of the data life cycle and lay its focus on the curation of data and metadata.The emphasis on FAIR practices, integration into the emerging NFDIs, interdisciplinary approaches to data management and on data curation are based on experiences acquired during the initial phase and on the requirements of the research projects in the SPP. The experiences gained in the first phase allow us to home in on the needs of the individual projects and the SPP as a whole. As a consequence, the focus of this project in the second phase has been sharpened to provide subject- and project-specific RDM support.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 2143: Entangled Africa: Intra-African connections between Rainforest and Mediterranean (ca. 6000 to 500 BP)
• Co-Investigator: Felix Rau
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Tilman Lenssen-Erz, until 8/2023 (†)