We develop an infrastructure to support and advance digital research activities at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) as well as other institutions. The project is led by the Library and Research IT at the MPIWG and implemented in close collaboration with external partners from academia and industry.
The infrastructure establishes a common technical standard and best-practices for digital research in the humanities. While it is derived from the specific knowledge economy at the MPIWG, it makes use of existing standards, technologies and APIs. It is generic enough to be implemented and adapted by other institutions with similar digital research needs.
Architecture of the Digital Research Infrastructure.
The architecture consists of a persistent and sustainable repository for digital resources, workflows and services for a wide variety of digital research methods and a central knowledge graph that makes sources and research data discoverable and usable. For the knowledge graph we rely on CIDOC-CRM as an established standards for modelling and exchanging data in the humanities. We implement Linked Open Data approaches for publishing our digital research outputs.
Our goals are to ensure accessibility and usability of our existing and future digital resources, to facilitate cutting-edge research with digital tools without compromising on scientific rigor, and to make our digital research outputs accessible and usable to the scientific community.
In 2021, the project was further developed into the Central Knowledge Graph.