Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (AdW)

The Göttingen Academy of Science and Humanities participates in the DH Research Collaboration with a sub-project that is based on material from the long-term project "Johann Friedrich Blumenbach-Online" at the Academy.

Blumenbach-Online started in January 2010 and aims at both digitizing and presenting online the writings and collections of the influential Goettingen physician and naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840). It is through an exploration and application of Semantic Web technologies that we hope to establish robust and powerful methods for presenting and providing heterogeneous machine readable linked data. These technologies model the semantic relationships between objects described by TEI-encoded texts and metadata of these items stored today in several University collections.

Another goal is to discover and render visible the intense connections of Blumenbach's writings with the objects studied by him through the usage of modern concepts and tools from the web of data. We also hope to support the Blumenbach-online project by evaluating and testing new technologies, which might prove useful for a sustainable presentation of the results of this and other projects.

Ultimately we are testing IT solutions that allow a joint presentation and use of data from various sources in a robust and open system, which allows for the presentation of heterogeneous data and is scalable and reusable in a generic way also for other projects of the Academy of Science. Following a policy of Open Access and Linked Open Data, we test and implement ways to generate and publish results of Academic research in a way that is reusable in other contexts and by other scientists. We actively support the setting up of a triple store at Goettingen that is shared by the project partners and provides - among other features - an open SPARQL endpoint to query the data in multiple ways.

Poster with the results of our NER on historical text corpora