The CENDARI Infrastructure

TL;DR

The CENDARI infrastructure provides web-based tools and a sophisticated platform to support transnational historical research, focusing on Medieval culture and World War I, by enabling collection, annotation, and search of large document corpora.

Contribution

It introduces a novel research infrastructure tailored to historians' needs, integrating tools for annotation, semantic enrichment, and workflow support based on user requirements.

Findings

Development of the Note Taking Environment with faceted search

Implementation of a Data Integration platform with semantic enrichment

Documentation of a new research workflow for historians

Abstract

The CENDARI infrastructure is a research supporting platform designed to provide tools for transnational historical research, focusing on two topics: Medieval culture and World War I. It exposes to the end users modern web-based tools relying on a sophisticated infrastructure to collect, enrich, annotate, and search through large document corpora. Supporting researchers in their daily work is a novel concern for infrastructures. We describe how we gathered requirements through multiple methods to understand the historians' needs and derive an abstract workflow to support them. We then outline the tools we have built, tying their technical descriptions to the user requirements. The main tools are the Note Taking Environment and its faceted search capabilities, the Data Integration platform including the Data API, supporting semantic enrichment through entity recognition, and the environment supporting the software development processes throughout the project to keep both technical partners and researchers in the loop. The outcomes are technical together with new resources developed and gathered, and the research workflow that has been described and documented.