Medieval manuscript research is a complex, fragmented, multilingual field of
knowledge, which is difficult to navigate, analyse and exploit. Though printed sources
are still of great importance and value to researchers, there are now many services
on the Web, some commercial and many in the public domain. At present, these
services have to be consulted separately and individually. They employ a range of
different descriptive standards and vocabularies, and use a variety of technologies to
make their information available on the Web. This chapter proposes a new approach to
organizing the international collaborative infrastructure for interlinking knowledge and
research about medieval European manuscripts, based on technologies associated with
the Semantic Web and the Linked Data movement. This collaborative infrastructure
will be an open space on the Web where information about medieval manuscripts can
be shared, stored, exchanged and updated for research purposes. It will be possible to
ask large-scale research questions across the virtual global manuscript collection, in a
quicker and more effective way than has ever been feasible in the past. The proposed
infrastructure will focus on building links between data and will provide the basis
for new kinds of services which exploit these data. It will not aim to impose a single
metadata standard on existing manuscript services, but will build on existing databases
and vocabularies. The article describes the architecture, services and data which will
comprise this infrastructure, and discusses strategies for making th challenging and
exciting goal a reality
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