Task Area 1 - NFDI4Culture

Capture & Enrichment

Data capture and enrichment of digital cultural assets

Digital representations of tangible and intangible cultural assets provide an essential basis for research in the cultural heritage domain and are more and more present in the day-to-day work of scholars. Thereby, an ever-increasing variety of technologies and data types is being employed, such as 2D, 3D, audio, video, AR/VR, thermography or computer tomography.

Our overarching goal is to match the production and continuous enrichment of digital cultural heritage with the demands of researchers, GLAM experts and various other audiences. In close collaboration with the digitisation community, we seek to establish a strong network in order to facilitate a regular exchange between producers and users of digital materials. This will be complemented by open and modular services and tools for the capture and enrichment process of cultural heritage objects.

Our community ranges from digitisation centres and other experienced members with a strong focus on multimedia digitisation and methods, to research projects which have only just begun to apply data capture and enrichment for scholarly work.

We bring these interests groups together by establishing a scholarly forum on digital representations of cultural assets. Amongst other measures, this forum will feature events in regular intervals, introductory as well as in-depth workshop discussions and working groups. Community members with similar ideas, challenges and requests will thereby have an opportunity to exchange their experiences, establish new contacts or simply get inspired by new developments.

The extent to which digital representations meet the demands of the scholarly community is already influenced from the point at which the data and corresponding metadata begin to be produced. Our goal is to support researchers in identifying their needs and in choosing the appropriate procedures at all stages of the digitisation process, while also taking into account relevant requirements like interoperability and reusability. In order to respond to and forward upcoming specific requests, we will support our community by establishing a consulting agency.

Helpdesk

In addition, we would like to find out more about the main pathways of digital cultural objects, from digitisation via enrichment to reuse. In close exchange with the NFDI4Culture stakeholders and digitisation centres, we will identify the state of the art when it comes to the digitisation of cultural assets, new developments and needs for further standardisation. Survey results and additional data as well as overarching trends will be closely analysed and reported to the community on a regular basis.

One of our goals is to establish a modular, reusable tool set for granular, easily accessible web-based data annotation, which supports multiple layers of annotations for automatic/collaborative data enrichment and follows web annotation standards. Our focus lies on supporting collaboration between expert groups, mostly by complementing media viewers and metadata display in Wikibase and similar environments with additional user annotation elements.