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DARIAH includes two technical demonstrators that were initially aimed at showcasing key enabling technologies for the future infrastructure. These demonstrators soon developed into something much more than just technical proof-of-concepts. They became attempts by two DARIAH associated communities to position themselves within the DARIAH infrastructure. Important to the success of both demonstrators was activating two key Digital Humanities communities: digital archaeology and text encoding.
Already in the DARIAH preparatory phase, we work not just on technical experiments, which demonstrate that we can realistically build the DARIAH infrastructure, but also on community demonstrators, which make use of DARIAH infrastructure expertise to enhance research. The DARIAH technical work focuses on achieving not just a convincing overall architecture but also on being convincing for the community.
Both communities decided for themselves what the future role in DARIAH might look like by organising community workshop and events that discussed and planned the demonstrators. In this sense these demonstrators are part not just of a technical proof-of-concept but a proof-of-concept that DARIAH services can have a positive role in enhancing existing Digital Humanities research.
ARENA2 Demonstrator
The first community demonstrator, ARENA2, migrates a legacy application of the European archaeology community into a more sustainable service-oriented architecture (SOA). The EU Culture 2000 project Archaeological Records of Europe - Networked Access (ARENA) was completed in November 2004. This traditional metadata search portal service, based on Z39.50 and OAI harvesting, is enhanced by using DARIAH web services and by exposing the attached databases as autonomous services. With the ARENA2 demonstrator, DARIAH aims to show that search services on remote distributed archaeological monuments inventories (MI). The demonstrator is finished and is currently evaluated and rolled out at the ARENA member institutions.
This demonstrator will exhibit added value in terms of the ability to sustain applications from cultural heritage and arts and humanities research beyond the lifespan of this particular project. Deliverables for this demonstrator are not only the SOA itself, but a report of the steps involved for the migration for future reference. On the data side ARENA provides an excellent opportunity to test the use of complex structured data in DARIAH.
The basic architecture adopted follows the ‘Publish-Find-Bind’ approach. Services publish themselves to a registry as being in accordance with a web service specification. These services are then found and bound to by a client. In this case the specification is the ARENA Gateway Service Specification, the client is the ARENA2 portal, the services are either compliant monument inventory services or ‘wrapped’ services based on legacy protocols such as Z39.50 or OAI-PMH and the registry is an instance of a Universal Description Discovery and Integration registry, the ARENA UDDI registry.
The ARENA2 registry (or UDDI) was developed from a UK Historic Environment Information Resource Network registry to allow the automatic discovery of candidate ARENA2 services. This means that the client (portal) can automatically find appropriate services as they are registered allowing an important layer of indirection between the client and service management. This also has the benefit of potentially facilitating additional services based in the registry, such as polling, access control and service validation. The ARENA2 registry is now available online. This can can be searched and explored without the need to log-in.
TEI Demonstrator
The second demonstrator delivers a publication platform for textual resources annotated according to the Text Encoding Initiative standard (TEI). The TEI demonstrator shows how the standard repository software Fedora can be used to publish complex TEI research objects, which dominate many of the research outputs in digital Humanities. DARIAH will help publish deep semantic annotations and showcase that DARIAH can support core Digital Humanities primitives.
The purpose of the DARIAH TEI Demonstrator is to demonstrate the practical benefits of using TEI for the representation of digital resources of all kinds, but primarily of original source collections within the arts and humanities. The Demonstrator aims to make it easy for humanities researchers to share TEI-encoded texts with others, and to compare their encoding practice with that of others in the TEI community. It also aims to show the "TEI Advantage", by showing how TEI can be used for textual materials in many languages, both for richly encoded complex materials and for minimally encoded basic texts.
Read more about the TEI Demonstrator
