No source: created in electronic format.
The construction of the Digital Knowledge-Store intends to collect and bundle all
digital resources of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
(BBAW)
The BBAW is an institution with a long tradition in humanities research. It hosts various humanities long-term projects, which also do research on textual resources in many different languages from all over the world and any historic period. These projects generate research results that are also published digitally and include a variety of different resource types ranging from digital and interactive scholarly editions over collections of databases and images to multimedia content. These digital resources are unique and contain high quality content, for example, digital publications of medieval charters, ancient inscriptions, stained glass studies, manuscripts and much more. The variety of research content and data formats lead to the desire to build a centralized access point to all digital resources of the BBAW.
During the last decade the BBAW was deeply involved in the development of methods, tools,
publications and frameworks of digital media and digital resources for scholars
in the humanities. With the foundation of the TELOTA
The proposed paper will present the Digital Knowledge-Store of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and show possibilities and methods in the development of an interdisciplinary virtual research environment containing a high diversity of content, languages, data formats and objects.
The work on the Digital Knowledge-Store was started in 2009 by the TELOTA working group of the
Academy. During the current project phase, which started in September 2011 and
is funded for three years by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German
Research Foundation)
The potential of the Knowledge-Store lies in its way of dealing with the process of searching. One can think of the interface as a way rather to interact with the Knowledge-Store than just a query-answer process. The dialog based retrieval interface, the Knowledge-Browser, is conceptually a completely new development and tries to detach from traditional search interfaces by developing entirely new finding strategies. The Knowledge-Browser can be seen as a tool that enables an interactive step-by-step process of computer aided information retrieval.
A possible scenario would be a researcher who has a question about a certain topic but who does not know the BBAW project which could hold the answer. In that case the Knowledge-Store is the tool to solve this problem. The scholar starts the search with a query on a certain subject. In every following step he will receive qualified links to resources which contain the query term or conceptually related terms out of all the Academy’s digital resources. With every further step the scholar can browse a related term on the basis of the received results in a different context. As the resources will be linked semantically, every step of the query process offers a new query context. Hence the knowledge browsing is an interactive and multilevel process, which makes implicit connections between different internal and external resources explicit.
Rather than just giving the user the possibility to reduce the search results by filtering, as faceted search interfaces do, it extends the result by offering semantic recommendations for data and documents which were not present in the previous search results. On the basis of these connections the user can search overall in projects and even external project resources to find not only the desired answer but the queried term in different contexts and meanings which will lead to more meaningful connections between the research contexts which were not visible before.
The challenges result mainly from the heterogeneous resources which are stored in the various
repositories and databases hosted by the BBAW. By defining a metadata scheme for
all the different resources in the Academy the Knowledge-Store will provide a
basis for the extraction of information by the Knowledge-Browser and a
connection to related external projects. This supports interoperability between
research data of the BBAW and projects such as Europeana
On the level of linguistic analysis an important problem to solve is that the multilingual
textual resources in a major part do not follow a normalized orthography or a
consistent language space. For the written German language of the 19th century
the German Text Archive (DTA)
Additionally the Knowledge-Store aims to
make all digital textual resources of the Academy accessible as full texts.
Therefore it is important to build up an index which is prepared for a search
based on linguistic methods, text mining and semantic information retrieval.
This index is prepared using the aforementioned services for a search in corpora
of different languages and in historic writings as well. The index uses a
Lucene
The Knowledge-Store will enable a new way of querying humanities resources. The combination of the Academy’s resources, the Knowledge-Browser and the development of information extraction tools will lead to an infrastructure which allows to put the knowledge of the Academy’s different projects in different contexts. The Knowledge-Store will be build on open source technologies. On the same time it will realize by these means an interoperable infrastructure which can show new possibilities in the usage of Digital Humanities techniques. It guides the humanities scholar to new ways of thinking about the projects contexts by interconnecting and intercontextualizing the research resources in the BBAW. In developing a semantically interlinked base of resources which is capable of gaining knowledge by querying information in various contexts of the Academy’s projects, the Knowledge-Store will serve as a part of the realization of the Web of Data as well as it can be an exemplary project to establish a work flow for the integration of external infrastructure projects into one single endpoint.
A prototype version of the Knowledge-Store which does not include the Knowledge-Browser can be found at http://www.bbaw.de/en/telota/resources/dkb.
A much more developed interface will be available at conference time.
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