DARIAH members can contribute to the DARIAH community with a diverse range of resources, services and activities. Through this online tool the contributions are collected and disseminated. Furthermore the contributions can be evaluated using the self-assessment and peer review process which verifies the compatibility of the service or activity to the infrastructure, therefore allowing researchers to find matching services and activities more easily. Additionally the tool will also be used to collect, value and monitor national in-kind contributions.
The project Humanities At Scale is currently developing a reference architecture for the submission of the DARIAH-EU in-kind contributions.
The main goals of this reference architecture are:
1.To communicate and to describe contributions in a common language and to have a common understanding of what components should be described.
The in-kind contributions have never been formally described before, including their creation processes. The result is that up to now the contributions have been interpreted and labelled in different ways by each contributing country, by making the inkind registry highly heterogeneous and unreliable from an end user perspective.
2.To facilitate the description of the interactions between components of the in-kinds, according to the services or functions they provide.
How do the components of the contributions interact? How are they connected? What this reference architecture brings to life is not only a reliable description of the DARIAH contributions, but their description as processes and evolving systems, rather than immovable objects. We think therefore that it is important to describe these changes and interactions with the environments in which the contributions evolve.
3.To offer an architectural reference for other projects and infrastructures that wish to offer similar services to their (research) communities.
4. To Mitigate and Reduce the risk: we consider this reference architecture as a way to reduce the risk mainly derived from point 1: that of interpreting the in-kind contributions in different ways, to describe them without a common reference model. This risk exists not only among partners inside the same research infrastructure but also for who accesses the DARIAH contributions from other infrastructures.”
