WissKi Barrels Domain-specific research data management systems based on the scientific communication infrastructure

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Daniel Hess
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548273479

At the beginning of a project, data curators face the challenge of developing an appropriate data model for their subject matter, research question, and methodology, and implementing it in a digital research environment. In order to create linked open data, that is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable data, it is important to design and document data models accordingly. Standards or domain ontologies such as the CIDOC-CRM provide guidance to researchers by providing concepts and their relationships to describe things within a knowledge domain. They define these concepts and also constrain the possible relationships between them. In doing so, these provide researchers with a basic semantics for research objects and their characteristics. However, for many projects, domain ontologies are too general and operate, for example, at the level of the "biological object" rather than at the level of the "dry specimen." Researchers are therefore often forced to extend and adapt domain ontologies for their research subject, and to create so-called application ontologies. These build the groundwork for concrete data models, implemented in a user interface, in which data are captured and related as entities with their properties. This multi-level concretization leads to the fact that data models - although created for a similar research object - are so specific that they cannot simply be reused in other projects. However, developers and users of the research data management system WissKI (wissenschaftliche Kommunikationsinfrastruktur - scientific communication infrastructure) have been able to determine since the 14-year existence of the software that, depending on the subject area, certain basic entities such as "institution", "birthplace", "production" or "provenance" exist with properties such as "name", "date" or "type", which are repeatedly modeled, described and related in the same or at least similar way. The requirements for certain functionalities of the systems such as an image viewer or the possibility for geospatial representations are also similar within a subject area. The Germanic National Museum as the developing institution of the software WissKI is the hub of more than 70 projects at more than 30 institutions. It is thus able to synthesize subject data models from several data models of a subject area implemented in WissKI and to offer them to users in a preconfigured system via user-friendly provisioning options. Users thus have an out-of-the-box research data management system and do not have to spend time installing and configuring web applications and modeling basic concepts, but can concentrate on the specifics of their project.

• DFG Programme: Cooperation and Networking (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)