What services and tools are available for the Digital Humanities community within DARIAH? Where can the researcher look up a service? This crucial user requirement can’t be served sufficiently within the current landscape until the DARIAH Open Marketplace will be launched in the near future. The Open Marketplace will then serve as central information hub.
Within DESIR (DARIAH ERIC Sustainability Refined) this question has been addressed from a different perspective. Are there any gaps within the DARIAH service landscape, unserved user requirements or possible service enhancements that could be addressed within DESIR?
For this end and to facilitate the decision process for specific (new) service demonstrators and concepts a gap analysis of the DARIAH research infrastructure has been conducted and Open Access published at HAL: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01663594
The report has been compiled with regard to the innovative technology areas entity-based search, scholarly content management, text analysis services and visualisation.
Some findings of the reports are:
- A broad range of services, tools and resources can be found however it is in considerable number of cases difficult for the user to clearly associate them with DARIAH.
- Within this broad number it is not always possible to decide whether a service is still active, maintained, or being further developed.
- As relativisation of (possibly) high expectations: One has to consider the prevalent research nature of DARIAH and its ongoing and lengthy institutionalisation process.
- The report selected 82 services in total where the aforementioned question of activity seems to be clear.
- The 82 services are tagged with 110 categories like VRE, visualisation, content, repository, NLP tool etc. allowing the clustering of the services along the DESIR requirements.
- A large group of services (27) stands for some form of content or data, 15 services can be associated with data analysis and databases, 12 services can be described as some sort of repository (publications and research data) and 13 services are attributed as virtual research environments.
- DARIAH is without doubt a research oriented infrastructure: The majority of 76% of the 82 services could be associated with research purposes, the remaining 24% are associated with communication or basic infrastructure purposes.
- Obvious gaps in an infrastructural sense couldn’t be identified but here one has to take in mind the research driven character of DARIAH: With occurrence of a specific user requirement it is not unusual that a service or tool comes into being.
These results feed into the discussion for the conceptual models within DESIR work package 4 Technology. As result it is planned to develop three demonstrators until the end of project in spring 2019.
These results feed into the discussion for the conceptual models within DESIR work package 4 Technology. As result it is planned to develop three demonstrators until the end of project in spring 2019.
