Flex Funds

The flex funds were intended for direct distribution to the community in the first funding phase. In the area of "Research Tools and Data Services", an annual public community forum on the "Further Development of Research Tools & Data Services in NFDI4Culture" was organised from 2021 to 2024. In consultation with researchers from the various disciplines, the needs of the community were identified and proposals for research funding were discussed.
Over a period of four years, a total of approximately € 400,000 has been distributed to the NFDI4Culture communities through the annual forum on the "Further Development of Research Tools & Data Services", thus promoting user-oriented and sustainable software development.

2021
In the first project year of NFDI4Culture, the further developments listed below were carried out by employees of Task Area 3 (Research Tools and Data Services) during the Community Forum's set-up phase. The selection of these measures was based on various events to prepare the consortium during the application phase.
These measures are:

• Components in Pandora (image similarity search and integration of further formats in Prometheus)
• MEIGarage (modularization and further features)
• IIIF Annotation Server (Advanced Annotations-Plugin, Resource List-Plugin, Adapted User Interface-Plugin)

2022
The first Community Forum took place in November 2021 and the results of the forum were subsequently analysed. Measures that address a community need, for which there is no alternative free software, that can be developed sustainably and that can be implemented as part of a FlexFunds project, were proposed to the Culture Steering Board for funding.
Fortunately, the application was accepted and the following proposed measures can be funded in 2022 with a total of € 93,000:

• CollAna , collation tool for prints (report)
• ConedaKor , documentation/optimisation of open source graph database system (report)
• 4D-Community-Browser, conception, realisation prototype (report)
• kompakkt ,  optimisation of 3D viewer and annotation (report)
• OpenRefine , data cleansing knowledge databases (report)
• TOSCA , modelling of application structures (report)

2023

The second community forum took place in September 2022. Following a vote by the Culture Steering Board, funding totaling €120,000 was approved for the following projects:

• CVMA, further development of Graphical User Interface
• CollAna, further development
• Linking Data einfacher gemacht, development of the graphical user interface of a web component
• mei-friend Editor, expansion of the user interface   
• 4D-Community-Browser 2.0, further development
• WissKI-Cloud, development of the possibility to easily set up customized WissKI instances
• iArt , Extending the project
• meico, MusicXML integration
• OpenRefine, further development
• Kompakkt, further development

The reports are published here in separate online publication.

2024

The third community forum took place in September 2023. Following a vote by the Culture Steering Board, funding totaling €120,000 was approved for the following projects:

• Konvertierung MEI zu MusicXML für Metadaten und Musikcodierung
• MLNA – Ein Python-Paket und -App für multilinguale Netzwerkanalyse
  (bei Einreichung: Entwicklung eines KI-basierten Multilingual Network Analysis-Tools zur Erforschung von Medienentwicklung und -wirkung in europäischen und nicht-europäischen Gesellschaften)
• Dynamic scoring-up and display of early music in Verovio. Algorithmen zur
  Verarbeitung und Darstellung von Mensuralnotation
• Updating and future-proofing the visual design system of Kompakkt durch
  Unterstützung von Mehrsprachigkeit und Landing-Pages für Projekte und
  Institutionen
• Text and Video Documentation for the Domestic Beethoven Annotator App. Eine
  Linked-Data-basierte Annotations-App für musikalische Inhalte
• Graphic Design History Database (GERD) Upgrade durch Anreicherung der
  Datenbank mit weiteren Datensätzen und Verbesserung der Funktionalität
• Annotationsdaten aus dem zeitgenössischen Tanz erhalten und erweitern:
  Migration der Daten der Forsythe Company und des Motion Bank Projekts 2008-
  2023 durch Aktualisierung und Standardisierung der Formate der Annotationen
• Extending Wikibase with terminology capabilities to meet the needs of
  NFDI4Culture stakeholders durch die Integration von Antelope (Annotation,
  Terminology Lookup and Personalization)
• Facepager for NFDI. Erweiterung und Verbesserung des didaktischen Werkzeugs
  Facepager zum vereinfachten Erlernen des Umgang mit Daten und Daten-
  Schnittstellen
• Öffnung der Quellenbestände osmanischer Kunstmusik und ihrer Komponisten und Lyriker via Datenmapping zu RISM, musiconn und GND

The reports are published here in separate online publication.

2025

The fourth community forum took place in September 2024. Following a vote by the Culture Steering Board, funding totaling €90,000 was approved for the following projects:

• Galaxy – Open Refine Integration
• Refining and Documenting the Music Annotation Model
• ConedaKOR-StatServ - Entwicklung eines nachhaltigen, statischen Services für ConedaKOR-Instanzen
• Weiterentwicklung der Software TIMAAT zur Analyse ausiovisueller Social Media-Inhalte
• Updating and future-proofing the user interaction and system integration of Kompakkt
• Citation Genealogy Analysis for Cultural Heritage Research – Tool Development
• Integration von „Die Deutschen Inschriften“ in den Culture Knowledge Graph
• Wikibase to Jupyter Notebooks: Publishing from digital collections

Outside of this funding, the project Lara 3D – Automatisierte Datenverarbeitung von kunsthistorischen Inhalten mit LARA was also realized. 

The reports are published here in separate online publication.