A Conceptual Model for Scholarly Research Activity

This paper presents a conceptual model for scholarly research activity, developed as part of the conceptual modelling work within the ???Preparing DARIAH??? European e-Infrastructures project. It is inspired by cultural-historical activity theory, and is expressed in terms of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, extending its notion of activity so as to also account, apart from historical practice, for scholarly research planning. It is intended as a framework for structuring and analyzing the results of empirical research on scholarly practice and information requirements, encompassing the full research lifecycle of information work and involving both primary evidence and scholarly objects; also, as a framework for producing clear and pertinent information requirements, and specifications of digital infrastructures, tools and services for scholarly research. We plan to use the model to tag interview transcripts from an empirical study on scholarly information work, and thus validate its soundness and fitness for purpose

Understanding the Information Requirements of Arts and Humanities Scholarship

This paper reports on research of scholarly research practices and requirements conducted in the context of the Preparing DARIAH European e-Infrastructures project, with a view to ensuring current and future fitness for purpose of the planned digital infrastructure, services and tools. It summarises the findings of earlier research, primarily from the field of human information behaviour as applied in scholarly work, it presents a conceptual perspective informed by cultural-historical activity theory, it introduces briefly a formal conceptual model for scholarly research activity compliant with CIDOC CRM, it describes the plan of work and methodology of an empirical research project based on open-questionnaire interviews with arts and humanities researchers, and presents illustrative examples of segmentation, tagging and initial conceptual analysis of the empirical evidence. Finally, it presents plans for future work, consisting, firstly, of a comprehensive re-analysis of interview segments within the framework of the scholarly research activity model, and, secondly, of the integration of this analysis with the extended digital curation process model we presented in earlier work

Synchronization and Multiple Group Server Support for Kepler

In the last decade literally thousands of digital libraries have emerged but one of the biggest obstacles for dissemination of information to a user community is that many digital libraries use different, proprietary technologies that inhibit interoperability. Kepler framework addresses interoperability and gives publication control to individual publishers. In Kepler, OAI-PMH is used to support personal data providers or archivelets . . In our vision, individual publishers can be integrated with an institutional repository like Dspace by means of a Kepler Group Digital Library (GDL). The GDL aggregates metadata and full text from archivelets and can act as an OAI-compliant data provider for institutional repositories. The basic Kepler architecture and it working have been reported in earlier papers. In this paper we discuss the three main features that we have recently added to the Kepler framework: mobility support for users to switch transparently between traditional archivelet s to on-server archivelets, the ability of users to work with multiple GDLs, and flexibility to individual publishers to build an OAI-PMH compliant repository without getting attached to a GDL

DCC&U: An Extended Digital Curation Lifecycle Model

The proliferation of Web, database and social networking technologies has enabled us to produce, publish and exchange digital assets at an enormous rate. This vast amount of information that is either digitized or born-digital needs to be collected, organized and preserved in a way that ensures that our digital assets and the information they carry remain available for future use. Digital curation has emerged as a new inter-disciplinary practice that seeks to set guidelines for disciplined management of information. In this paper we review two recent models for digital curation introduced by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and the Digital Curation Unit (DCU) of the Athena Research Centre. We then propose a fusion of the two models that highlights the need to extend the digital curation lifecycle by adding (a) provisions for the registration of usage experience, (b) a stage for knowledge enhancement and (c) controlled vocabularies used by convention to denote concepts, properties and relations. The objective of the proposed extensions is twofold: (i) to provide a more complete lifecycle model for the digital curation domain; and (ii) to provide a stimulus for a broader discussion on the research agenda

Cultural Documentation: The Clio System

Cultural documentation, i.e. the recording and management of a body of knowledge about ensembles of cultural goods, presents special requirements of a computer-based information system, not met by ordinary documentation systems and cultural information bases. The CLIO system aims at covering these needs, while it can also cooperate with an administrative documentation system. Information is organized in CLIO as a knowledge base according to a specifically designed semantic model. The construction of CLIO allows extremely dense linking of information, access by unlimited chained references, expression of abstract properties and various ways of joint temporal and spatial assignment. It also allows the extension and modification of the data schema by the users, thus supporting the easy adaptation of the system to the field of work and the evolution of knowledge. 1. The documentation of cultural goods and the CLIO system. The documentation requirements of cultural goods range from keepin..

An Evidential Model for Estimating the Salience of Attributes in Classification Schemes

In inexact information retrieval, it is often necessary to know the importance of the various descriptive features of the objects to be retrieved for appraising the extent to which they fit a query. Elegant solutions to this problem have been developed for documents with textual, flat formats but not for objects with complex, structural representations, highly interrelated and organised according to classification schemes that change frequently. Information structured according to this latter object-oriented form is normally found in engineering databases, such as software repositories. This paper presents a model for estimating the importance of the various descriptive features of such objects on the basis of their modelling in classification schemes. The model does not require any sort of importance related information from the user, is computationaly effective and has been applied successfully, as a constituent of a computational model of similarity, to the retrieval of software art..

APOLLONIS: The Greek Infrastructure for Digital Arts, Humanities and Language Research and Innovation

Abstract and poster of paper 0334 presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2019 (DH2019), Utrecht , the Netherlands 9-12 July, 2019