Objects as information carriers

The cluster aims to establish an open community representing both collecting and editing institutions as well as researchers from disciplines that deal with written artefacts as a material tradition from different areas and periods. The cluster focuses on objects as carriers of (semantic) information that can be expressed in texts, individual letters or signs. The overarching goal is to capture the interrelations between the materiality of an object, the respective object history and the semantic information conveyed by texts/letters/signs from the perspective of research data management. Needs, goals and feasibility are therefore to be defined in processes driven by the members of the cluster. These may include topics such as:

• qualification of research data through generally accepted and semantically coordinated authority files, vocabularies and ontologies developed by the community at the interface between textual, object-descriptive, visual and (geo-)spatial information.
• improving the interoperability of existing data collections and data discovery services.
• transfer of high-quality research standards from reference works (e.g. CIL, CSIR, IG, LIMC, RPC) to the semantic web.
• criteria for the development and systematic improvement of data collections / databases that record aspects of the materiality of written artefacts in a structured manner