Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities
The European Approach
Ellen Willemse, DANS
Stuart Jeffrey, ADS
DARIAH is a major European academic project, aiming for the durable preservation of research data from across the arts and humanities, access to these data and related services and tools on a European scale. The lead partners are the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France), Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (Germany), Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS, Netherlands) and The Centre for e-Research in London. There are a further ten partners with responsibility for particular projects elements based in Ireland, Cyprus, Greece, Slovenia, Croatia and elsewhere.
The ADS are excited to be at the centre of such an ambitious, cross-disciplinary and cross-border project. Preparations for DARIAH's implementation are currently in full progress and it is hoped that in the future, the DARIAH website will allow researchers to easily: search through available data across Europe; get access to and download data; use and download interpretation and analysis tools; find information on digitisation, legal issues and metadata standards.
The proposed structure of the DARIAH project, with a central coordinating institute having numerous lines of communication to national and international groups.
DARIAH also intends to actively promote and support the establishment of national data centres in European states, standardisation, metadata usage and knowledge dissemination. It will also provide tailored training and advice, all with the purpose of making as much research data available as possible.
The guiding principle behind DARIAH is that it brings together experts and organisations from a number of fields: digital archives, libraries and data centres, research practitioners and research groups, technologists, computer and information scientists and supporting services such as legal advisory services. In its initial phase DARIAH will therefore already comprise a mix of such experts and organisations. Research communities will provide data and interpretation and analysis tools, as well as assurance that DARIAH responds to the actual needs of researchers.
The ADS has a core role in the creation of the technical infrastructure proposed by DARIAH. There are intended to be a number of technical exemplar elements to DARIAH and the ADS will be building on the extensive experience of cross-border data aggregation garnered during the Archaeological Records of Europe Networked Access (ARENA) project. The ARENA project created a cross-searching portal comprising archaeological datasets from six European countries. Under the DARIAH project we intend to revisit ARENA and re-cast the technical infrastructure of the system using a SOAapproach. At the same time we hope to demonstrate how legacy systems like ARENA can adopt an SOA, but retain the data structures that are most appropriate or are simply too costly to alter such as Z39.50.
The ADS task of reworking ARENA to bring it to service is hoped to start in late 2008 or early 2009.
DARIAH: http://www.dariah.eu/
ARENA: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/arena/index.html
