WissKI Environment

WissKI (Wissenschaftliche Kommunikationsinfrastruktur – Scientific Communication Infrastructure) is a specialised system for managing and publishing research and cultural heritage data, built on WissKI and the open-source CMS Drupal. As a digital platform, it is suited to museum and (university) collections and other settings where objects and metadata need to be described and made available over the long term.

WissKI is presented as a virtual research environment and software for Linked Open Data: content can be entered through familiar web forms, while semantic modelling and open standards support RDF and ontologies. Data modelling follows an ontological approach, preferentially but not exclusively in the CIDOC CRM ecosystem. Authors can maintain revisions and translations, expose data through a wide range of interfaces, and apply fine-grained access control for who may view or edit what. WissKI also supports goals around findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) research data across the research data lifecycle.

From a technical perspective, linked data is typically stored in a dedicated external triple store with its own endpoints, so the RDF layer remains largely independently addressable from the Drupal site. In this deployment, WissKI is preconfigured for collection use cases and ships with an OpenGDB triple store, a MariaDB database (for Drupal), and a coordinated default data model and module setup in the sense of the WissKI Barrel approach: ready-to-use, field-tested curation and publication environments with appropriate modules, forms, and views (see the approach and methodology of the Barrel project).

Background and community: information on history, funding, and the wider community is on wiss-ki.eu (including documentation as linked from the project site) and in the WissKI Zotero library. For questions, use email or chat.wiss-ki.eu.