Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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Accord<strong>in</strong>g to Blanke, DARIAH thus seeks to build a secure, distributed, and customizable
<strong>in</strong>frastructure. Similar to TextGrid, DARIAH <strong>in</strong>tends to create a flexible architecture that is loosely
coupled so other communities can also add their own services on top of it.
Aschenbrenner et al. (2010) have also stated that the major strategy beh<strong>in</strong>d the DARIAH repository
<strong>in</strong>frastructure is that <strong>in</strong>dividual repositories should rema<strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong>dependent and evolve over time (thus
rema<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g open), but at the same time all contents and tools provided through DARIAH should appear
to researchers as if they were us<strong>in</strong>g a s<strong>in</strong>gle platform (thus a closely knit <strong>in</strong>frastructure). Various
<strong>in</strong>stitutions and researchers have been <strong>in</strong>vited to contribute their content and tools to the DARIAH
<strong>in</strong>frastructure, and Aschenbrenner et al. reported that they are committed to support<strong>in</strong>g reasonable
levels of semantic diversity and <strong>in</strong>teroperability:
L<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g diversity is at the core of Dariah’s philosophy. Discipl<strong>in</strong>es <strong>in</strong> the humanities differ
greatly with regard to their resources—their data, tools, and methodologies. Moreover,
<strong>in</strong>novation is sometimes associated with <strong>in</strong>troduc<strong>in</strong>g variations <strong>in</strong>to their data, tools, or
methodologies, thereby re<strong>in</strong>forc<strong>in</strong>g heterogeneity even with<strong>in</strong> a s<strong>in</strong>gle discipl<strong>in</strong>e. Through
l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g this diversity Dariah aims to build bridges, to enable researchers from different
discipl<strong>in</strong>es or cultural backgrounds to collaborate on the same material <strong>in</strong> a common research
environment, and to share their diverse perspectives and methodologies (Aschenbrenner et al.
2010).
DAR IAH seeks both to learn from and be <strong>in</strong>teroperable with other repository federation <strong>in</strong>itiatives
such as DRIVER and Europeana 748 and consequently has decided not to enforce rich metadata
guidel<strong>in</strong>es. The project is still determ<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g how to deal with diversity not only among research data <strong>in</strong>
the humanities but also among the different agents that will participate <strong>in</strong> the DARIAH environment
(e.g., collaboration platforms, service registries, private and public archives, content or service
providers, applications and data created by <strong>in</strong>dividual scholars). Aschenbrenner et al. (2010) also
emphasized that <strong>in</strong>teroperability is not the same as uniformity; any <strong>in</strong>teroperability scheme used for
DARIAH may differ significantly from <strong>in</strong>ternal metadata schemes used at <strong>in</strong>dividual partner sites.
Currently DARIAH is work<strong>in</strong>g on “enabl<strong>in</strong>g an evolutionary metadata approach” where scholars can
start with m<strong>in</strong>imum annotation and this can be extended over time by other scholars or automatically.
To support the federation of a wide variety of repositories and other agents, DARIAH has created a
prototype federation architecture 749 for “expos<strong>in</strong>g repository events” that is based on a “hybrid
push/poll notification pattern” us<strong>in</strong>g Atom and supports “CRUD” 750 events:
S<strong>in</strong>ce the Dariah environment will prospectively consist of a cont<strong>in</strong>uously grow<strong>in</strong>g number of
agents that may depend on each other’s state, a notification pattern is a suitable architectural
build<strong>in</strong>g block. The Atom feeds conta<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g the events of Dariah repositories can be consumed
by decentralised agents, decentralised mean<strong>in</strong>g that they only use the data available from the
Atom feeds and do not plug <strong>in</strong>to any proprietary repository <strong>in</strong>terfaces. Such decentralised
agents could hence be built by other <strong>in</strong>itiatives consum<strong>in</strong>g the event messages from various
sources without the repositories be<strong>in</strong>g aware of them (Aschenbrenner et al. 2010).
748 http://www.europeana.eu/
749 In addition to us<strong>in</strong>g the Atom syndication format (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt), this prototype made use of the Metadata Object Description
Schema (MODS) (http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/) for <strong>in</strong>dividual digital object descriptions and OAI-ORE Resource Maps for the creation of
aggregated objects.
750 CRUD: The creation, update, or deletion of an object <strong>in</strong> a digital repository.