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The Specialised Information Service Performing Arts (SIS PA) is part of a funding programme by the German Research Foundation that enables libraries to develop tailor-made services for individual disciplines in order to provide researchers direct access to relevant materials and resources from their field. For the field of performing arts, the SIS PA is aggregating metadata about theater and dance resources from currently, mostly, German-speaking cultural heritage institutions in a VuFind-based search portal.
In this article, we focus on metadata quality and its impact on the aggregation workflow by describing the different, possibly data provider-specific, process stages of improving data quality in order to achieve a searchable, interlinked knowledge base. We also describe lessons learned and limitations of the process.
The Specialized Information Service Biodiversity Research (BIOfid) has been launched to mobilize valuable biological data from printed literature hidden in German libraries for over the past 250 years. In this project, we annotate German texts converted by OCR from historical scientific literature on the biodiversity of plants, birds, moths and butterflies. Our work enables the automatic extraction of biological information previously buried in the mass of papers and volumes. For this purpose, we generated training data for the tasks of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Taxa Recognition (TR) in biological documents. We use this data to train a number of leading machine learning tools and create a gold standard for TR in biodiversity literature. More specifically, we perform a practical analysis of our newly generated BIOfid dataset through various downstream-task evaluations and establish a new state of the art for TR with 80.23% F-score. In this sense, our paper lays the foundations for future work in the field of information extraction in biology texts.
Biodiversity research heavily relies on recent and older literature, and the data contained therein. Despite great effort, large parts of the literature and the data it holds are still not available in appropriate formats needed for efficient compilation and analysis. As a part of the current funding strategy of the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), and resulting from an extensive dialogue with the scientific community in Germany, a "Specialised Information Service" (Fachinformationsdienst, FID) for Biodiversity Research will be established with the objective of making further segments of literature about biodiversity available in up-to-date formats. This project, starting 2017, is conducted by the University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg (Frankfurt/Main, Germany) together with the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung and the Text Technology Lab of the Goethe University (Frankfurt/Main).
The new Specialised Information Service for Biodiversity Research (FID Biodiversitätsforschung) comprises four core elements: (A) A text mining approach which encompasses advanced text technologies and a large body of 20th century literature; (B) the digitisation of selected German biodiversity literature; (C) a platform für Open Access journals; and (D) Acquisition of specialised print literature.
Web archives created by the Internet Archive (IA) (https://archive.org), national libraries and other archiving services contain large amounts of information collected for a time period of over twenty years. These archives constitute a valuable source for research in many disciplines, including the digital humanities and the historical sciences by offering a unique possibility to look into past events and their representation on the Web.
Most Web archive services aim to capture the entire Web (IA) or national top-level domains and are therefore broad in their scope, diverse regarding the topics they contain and the time intervals they cover. Due to the large size and the broad scope it is difficult for interested researchers to locate relevant information in the archives as search facilities are very limited. Many users are more interested in studying smaller and topically coherent event-centric collections of documents contained in a Web archive [1,2]. Such collections can reflect specific events such as elections, or natural disasters, e.g. the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) or the German federal elections.
In order to promote the accessibility of biodiversity data in historic and contemporary literature, we introduce a new interdisciplinary project called BIOfid (FID=Fachinformationsdienst, a service for providing specialized information). The project aims at a mobilization of data available in print only by combining digitization of scientific biodiversity literature with the development of innovative text mining tools for complex, eventually semantic searches throughout the complete text corpus. A major prerequisite for the development of such search tools is the provision of sophisticated anatomy ontologies on the one hand, and of complete lists of species names (currently considered valid as well as all synonyms) at a global scale on the other hand. In the initial stage, we chose examples from German publications of the past 250 years dealing with the geographic distribution and ecology of vascular plants (Tracheophyta), birds (Aves), as well as moths and butterflies (Lepidoptera) in Germany. These taxa have been prioritized according to current demands of German research groups (about 50 sites) aiming at analyses and modeling of distribution patterns and their changes through time. In the long term, we aim at providing data and open source software applicable for any taxon and geographic region. For this purpose, a platform for open access journals for long-term availability of professional e-journals will be established. All generated data will also be made accessible through GFBio (German Federation for Biological Data). BIOfid is supported by the LIS-Scientific Library Services and Information Systems program of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
This paper introduces a novel research tool for the field of linguistics: The Linjgujisjtik web portal provides a virtual library which offers scientific information on every linguistic subject. It comprises selected internet sources and databases as well as catalogues for linguistic literature, and addresses an interdisciplinary audience. The virtual library is the most recent outcome of the Special Subject Collection Linguistics of the German Research Foundation (DFG), and also integrates the knowledge accumulated in the Bibliography of Linguistic Literature. In addition to the portal, we describe long-term goals and prospects with a special focus on ongoing efforts regarding an extension towards integrating language resources and Linguistic Linked Open Data.
Europeana provides a common access point to digital cultural heritage objects across different cultural domains among which the libraries. The recent development of the Europeana Data Model (EDM) provide new ways for libraries to experiment with Linked Data. Indeed the model is designed as a framework reusing various wellknown standards developed in the Semantic Web Community, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE), and Dublin Core namespaces. It provides new opportunities for libraries to provide rich and interlinked metadata to the Europeana aggregation.
However to be able to provide data to Europeana, libraries need to create mappings from the librarystandard to EDM. This step involves decisions based on domainspecific requirements and on the possibilities offered by EDM. The crossdomain nature of EDM limiting in some cases the completeness of the mappings, extension of the model have been proposed to accommodate the library needs.
The "Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana" project (DM2E) has created an extension of EDM to optimise the mappings of librarydata for manuscripts. This extension is in the form of subclasses and subproperties that further specialise EDM concepts and properties. It includes spatial creation and publishing information, specific contributor and publication type properties and more.
Furthermore the granularity of the mapping has been extended to allow references and annotations on page level as required for scholarly work. As part of this project the metadata of the Hebrew Manuscripts as well as of the Medieval Manuscripts presented in the Digital Collections of the Frankfurt University Library have been mapped to this extension. This includes links to the Integrated Authority File (GND) of the German National Library with further links to the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF).
Based on this development a new comprehensive mapping from the digitalisation metadata format METS/MODS to EDM has been established for all materials of the Frankfurt Judaica in "Judaica Europeana ". It demonstrates today’s capabilities of the creation of linked Data structures in Europeana based on library catalogue data and structural data from the digitalisation process.
Cultural heritage reconstructed - Compact Memory and the Frankfurt Digital Judaica Collection
(2014)
Compact Memory, the internet archive of German Jewish periodicals, provides free global internet access to the vast majority of German-Jewish newspapers and periodicals of the 19th and 20th century.
Jewish historical newspapers are the invaluable sources that supply direct and detailed information of the transformation process of Jewry and offer new insights into European Jewish history. The use of these historical sources however is extremely difficult, as complete sets of periodicals are very rarely to be found and they are scattered all over the world in different libraries and archives and in different physical formats (paper, microfilm).
Compact Memory contains the 110 most important Jewish German newspapers and periodicals in Central Europe in the period from 1806-1938, covering the complete range of religious, political, social, cultural and academic aspects of Jewish life. The texts are available partly as full-texts, processed by OCR, partly as graphic documents with corresponding index options. The database offers advanced search options, downloading and printing of articles. Thousands of essays of more than 10.000 individual contributors have been bibliographically indexed.
Compact Memory was established by the Judaica Division of the University Library Frankfurt am Main and in charge today in cooperation with the Aachen Chair of German-Jewish Literary History and the Cologne library Germania Judaica.
Compact Memory is one database within the Digital Collection Judaica which being part of Europeana and other digital portals offers resources for the reconstruction and representation of Jewish cultural heritage.
Vortrag im Rahmen des Symposiums der Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main in Kooperation mit der Frankfurter Buchmesse 2011 "Economy and Acceptance of Open Access Strategies", am 14.10.2011.