ACDH-CH Lecture 11.1

Federate All the Things!
Knowledge Representation and Semantic Retrieval in Distributed Research Data Infrastructures

with Prof. Torsten Schrade , Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz

When: Tuesday, January 14th 2025; 16:45 - 18:15

Where: University of Vienna, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Vienna,
Hörsaal 7 Hauptgebäude, Hochparterre, Stiege 7 and online (Zoom).

Registration: Kindly register via this link until Friday, January 10th.

---

The research landscape in cultural heritage is marked by a vast diversity of data, stakeholders, and methods. It spans individual scholars, creative practitioners, and citizen scientists, as well as public and private organisations, GLAM institutions, research institutes, and universities. Amidst this diversity lies a challenging wealth of data.

This talk focuses on current approaches to integrating multimodal research data into distributed, knowledge graph-driven research data infrastructures. Drawing on examples from NFDI4Culture — the consortium for research data on material and immaterial cultural heritage within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) — we will explore how semantic data integration workflows can be operationalised to create consistent knowledge representations across diverse academic fields.

At the same time, we will examine how semantic retrieval enables richer queries by combining textual, visual, audio, spatial, and temporal data, allowing for holistic data explorations that are particularly valuable in cultural heritage research, where context is paramount.

In concluding, we will focus on how data federation and decentralisation inspired by the Fediverse can serve as useful models for balancing data sovereignty and FAIR data provision across institutions and academic domains.

Literature:

• T. Tietz, O. Bruns, L. Söhn, J. Tolksdorf, E. Posthumus, J.J. Steller, H. Fliegl, E. Norouzi, J. Waitelonis, T. Schrade, H. Sack: From Floppy Disks to 5-Star LOD: FAIR Research Infrastructure for NFDI4Culture. In Proc. of 3rd Workshop on Metadata and Research (objects) Management for Linked Open Science - DaMaLOS 2023. https://repository.publisso.de/resource/frl:6444986
• J. Jalle Steller, L. Söhn, J. Tolksdorf, O. Bruns, T. Tietz, E. Posthumus, H. Fliegl, S. Pittroff, H. Sack, T. Schrade: Communities, Harvesting, and CGIF: Building the Research Data Graph at NFDI4Culture. In Proc. of DHd 2024: Quo Vadis DH?. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10698300
• RfII – German Council for Scientific Information Infrastructures: Federated Data Infrastructures for Scientific Use. NFDI, EOSC, Gaia-X, and the European Data Spaces: Comparison and Recommendations for a Committed Engagement to Shape the European Research Data Ecosystem, Göttingen 2024; p. 3-7, 36-40

Please RSVP for the onsite-lecture / register for the online lecture.

This ACDH-CH Lecture is organized in collaboration with the University of Vienna within the framework of the Digital Humanities Lecture Circuit .

about Torsten Schrade