The SODa Semantic Co-Working Space (SCS) is a digital infrastructure made up of various tools for diverse tasks across the collections data lifecycle. It offers many ways to connect, research, and learn. It was developed as part of the SODa project and is the technical foundation for the services, best practices, and content offered there.
Support for your collections data lifecycle
Users have access to various applications that allow them to model, develop, transform, migrate, analyze, visualize, store, publish, enrich, or process data with programming code.
Concept & planning
Conceptualizing and planning indexing and digitization projects is supported within the Semantic Co-Working Space by a collaborative office environment (Nextcloud). Integration of OnlyOffice and draw.io broadens the use case. Responsibilities can be organized via projects in the SCS.
Preparation & enrichment
Preparing data in substance includes, among other things, contextualization through metadata, annotations, and relationships between objects. Ontologies can be edited in WebProtégé, while OpenRefine supports data cleaning and enrichment.
Creating structured data
Structured creation of object and collection data is enabled for users through the ontology-based virtual research environment WissKI (Wissenschaftliche Kommunikationsinfrastruktur). Data are stored in an SQL database and a triple store and can be analyzed via JupyterHub.
Legal & ethical aspects
With regard to legal and ethical aspects, copyright and personality rights, data protection, and usage rights must in particular be reviewed and documented. Where possible, open licences should be applied, and ethical requirements observed by marking and protecting sensitive content.
Data quality & compatibility
The quality and compatibility of data are improved through the use of standards, authority data, and linked open data. In WissKI, modelling is typically based on the ISO standard CIDOC CRM. For the base data model in the SCS (an implementation of the minimal dataset recommendation for museums and collections), this has been extended.
FAIR long-term availability
Long-term availability is ensured by WissKI repositories, which—through ontology-based storage of data, automatic generation of persistent identifiers (PIDs), and provision of data via interfaces—enable durable, FAIR-compliant access to structured collection data.
Applications within a few clicks for you and your team
It is designed for people who work with academic university collections. To use the Semantic Co-Working Space, you need to register for a new account. Access to all applications and instances is managed for each user via a Keycloak account. In addition, as part of an IAM4NFDI incubator grant, login via didmos (DAASI IdM with open source) was implemented, enabling connection to the authentication and authorization infrastructure of the German Research Network (DFN-AAI).
This makes the SCS an integrated web environment that provides proven applications for digital work with collection data. It allows users to get started quickly, supports collaboration in complex contexts, and increases efficiency through preconfigured systems. Access can be extended to projects. That way you can easily share access to your applications with other users in the SCS without laboriously creating user accounts and managing their credentials.
Simple collaboration and data integration
Web apps such as WissKI and cloud services such as Nextcloud let you work on your projects at the same time and share data via shared folders with applications and people. You can use Nextcloud to create, edit, and manage office files, make them easily available in a shared folder in your JupyterHub, process them there with Python or OpenRefine, and import and publish them in WissKI or other databases.
Professional support from competent partners
In addition to regular workshops on using the SCS, our infrastructure team is available for any questions about the SCS. Furthermore, the options in the SCS are tailored to the requirements and skills of our subject matter experts. They support you on substantive questions across the collections data lifecycle and how to implement it in the SCS. For an introduction, please contact our infrastructure team, the helpdesk, or the relevant subject matter experts.
