Federate All Things!

The research landscape in cultural heritage is marked by a vast diversity of data, stakeholders, and methods. It spans individual scholars, creative practitioners, and citizen scientists, as well as public and private organisations, GLAM institutions, research institutes, and universities. Amidst this diversity lies a challenging wealth of data.

This lecture from the ACDH (Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities) focuses on current approaches to integrating multimodal research data into distributed, knowledge graph-driven research data infrastructures. Drawing on examples from NFDI4Culture — the consortium for research data on material and immaterial cultural heritage within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) — this talk explores how semantic data integration workflows can be operationalised to create consistent knowledge representations across diverse academic fields. Additionally, the lecture focuses on how data federation and decentralisation inspired by the Fediverse can serve as useful models for balancing data sovereignty and FAIR data provision across institutions and academic domains.

At the same time, this talk examine how semantic retrieval enables richer queries by combining textual, visual, audio, spatial, and temporal data, allowing for holistic data explorations that are particularly valuable in cultural heritage research, where context is paramount.

Learning Outcomes

After watching this lecture, learners will be able to:

• describe challenges regarding distriubuted data wealth
• discuss knowledge graph-driven research infrastructures
• illustrate the benefits of data federation for data sovereignty and FAIR data provision

ACDH Lecture