Why pool activities, resources and tools? Integrating and involving user communities in PARTHENOS

1. Introduction

The necessity of a general overall framework to encourage synergetic effects between different approaches to digital research on cultural heritage has inspired the PARTHENOS [12] project. PARTHENOS aims at providing this framework to European humanities researchers. The project name is an acronym describing the project’s goal to “Pool Activities, Resources and Tools for Heritage E-research Networking, Optimization and Synergies”.

EU projects and research infrastructures (RIs) participating in PATHENOS are CLARIN ERIC [6], DARIAH ERIC [8], ARIADNE [3], EHRI [9], CENDARI [4], CHARISMA [5] and IPERION-CH [11]. The main user communities of PARTHENOS represented by these partners are researchers in language related studies, studies of the past, heritage and applied disciplines and social sciences. PARTHENOS aims at integrating these areas of research, allowing researchers all over Europe to benefit from each other’s findings and making it easier to find and combine information from different domains. Therefore, PARTHENOS will join together data, services and people from many disciplines in the humanities.

By working together, PARTHENOS will:

● develop common standards to ease exploitation

● coordinate joint activities among research projects

● harmonize policy definition and implementation

● pool methods and services

● share solutions to the same problems

People and their expertise are at the heart of the RIs, whose aims are to bring together services, facilities, tools and software, data and people. PARTHENOS has started with four main identified sectors, will subsequently establish the necessary facilities and then add other DH areas to its scope.

2. Users and their requirements

PARTHENOS has undertaken an exercise to collect and review reports etc. from existing DH projects in order to gather requirements. Each RI also contributed Use Cases [7] from which requirements were extracted. The results were then published in the deliverable 2.1 [2]. Priority indications were recorded, depending on how important a requirement was for a sector and/or how many times it appeared and the number of different disciplines it applied to. The key areas that the project has focused upon are:

● Policy requirements concerning the research data lifecycle, quality assessment of digital repositories and quality assurance of data and metadata items

● Policy requirements concerning IPR, Open Data and Open Access

● Standardization

● Interoperability & related service requirements

● Training and education

3. What results will PARTHENOS produce?

PARTHENOS will establish the foundations for future interoperability in (digital) humanities: other domains will be able to integrate into the PARTHENOS infrastructure (under development). Less integrated domains will be able to learn the value of preserving and sharing data and findings. PARTHENOS will build bridges between existing European Research Infrastructure Consortiums (ERICs) and provide a roadmap for future development and collaborations.

PARTHENOS will produce:

● a coherent, authoritative, well accepted set of policies, guidelines and tools concerning the management of data lifecycle and related issues (e.g. IPR)

● a set of standards and semantics, originated from community needs and tailored to methodology and intended use by researchers (e.g. by use of CIDOC-CRM metadata to facilitate access to data resources [1, 10])

● a coherent set of tools for carrying out research (re-)using data (e.g. improved search and discovery services, federated ID)