Reporting on the D4Science-DARIAH Meeting

On 15 May 2009 D4Science ISTI-CNR partners met with DARIAH project representatives in Pisa, Italy. The meeting was dedicated to introduce D4Science, the Virtual Research Environment approach and enabling technology (gCube), and to discuss how they could address the requirements of the DARIAH research communities.

The DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) project, funded by the European ESFRI programme, aims at building a digital research infrastructure that will connect scholarly data archives and repositories with cultural heritage for the arts and humanities across Europe. It will offer a European data area where scholars and students will be able to easily survey information in their field of interest and use it to expand the knowledge and understanding of our heritage, histories, languages and cultures.

The project is currently involved in the preparatory phase of the research infrastructure. In order to show that a pan-European research infrastructure for the arts and humanities is feasible, the preparatory phase will deliver a consistent architecture and implementation plan as well as two proof-of-concept demonstrators. The architecture will be build upon work at the partner sites and on the investigation of existing research infrastructure solutions for their compatibility with arts and humanities research requirements. In particular, the plan is to adopt an architecture which integrates grid middleware with user facing tools to support e-research and e-learning activities. As far as demonstrators are concerned, they will build an exemplary digital archive of manuscript material and a service-oriented architecture of networked archaeological research databases.

The agenda of the meeting was as follows:

• DARIAH project overview
• D4Science project overview and evolution
• D4Science technology
• D4Science demo

Meeting participants:

• D4Science: Donatella Castelli (D4Science Project Director), Pasquale Pagano (D4Science Technical Director), Leonardo Candela from ISTI-CNR
• DARIAH: Tobias Blanke (DARIAH Technical Development Leader), Mark Hedges from the King's College London - Centre for eResearch

More information:

• DARIAH project: http://www.dariah.eu/
• King's College London - Centre for eResearch: http://kcl.ac.uk/iss/cerch/