Kick-Off Meeting and Launch of the LODinG Project

The project focuses on the application of Linked Open Data (LOD) in the humanities, with an emphasis on language, literature, culture, and media studies. The primary objective is to collect and model information in machine-readable, standardized formats, interlinking them with other resources and making them freely available. Entities such as people, places, organizations and topics are provided with unique identifiers through standard data in order to record rich, contextualized information in machine-readable statements and to be able to expand it collaboratively.

The project is divided into seven sub-projects, each managed by different teams:

• Sub-project 1: Corona and LOD – (Infectious) diseases in interconnected digital dictionaries. Team members: Susanne Kabatnik, Anne Klee, Claudia Bamberg, and research assistants.
• Sub-project 2: LOD for the editorial exploration of Spanish literature of the early modern period with a focus on botany and medicine. Team members: Claudia Bamberg, Folke Gernert, Claudine Moulin, Hannah Schlimpen, and research assistants.
• Sub-project 3: Extraction of semantic statements regarding the content of humanities literature using OpenAlex. Team members: Jens Bruchertseifer, Ralf Schenkel, Christof Schöch, and research assistants.
• Sub-project 4: Extraction of semantic statements regarding the content of Chinese-language literature. Team members: Jens Bruchertseifer, Kristin Shi-Kupfer, Ralf Schenkel, and research assistants.
• Sub-project 5: Exploration of text content and image elements using multimodal knowledge representation, using extensive collections of wine labels as an example. Team members: Claudine Moulin, Achim Rettinger, Christof Schöch, Veronika Wassermayr, Joëlle Weis, and research assistants.
• Sub-project 6: Legal LOD – Concept-based exploration of multilingual European legal texts. Team members: Thomas Burch, Benjamin Raue, Veronika Wassermayr, and research assistants.
• Sub-project 7: Cross-domain modeling of specialist knowledge in the humanities. Team members: Thomas Burch, Maria Hinzmann, Ralf Schenkel, Achim Rettinger, and research assistants.
• Technical infrastructure and support are managed by Thomas Burch, Frank Queens, Jörg Röpke, Doris Schirra, and research assistants.
• Jacek Kudera, along with the project spokespeople, is responsible for project coordination.

In addition to introducing the sub-projects, communication channels, shared project repositories, and a shared literature library were discussed. A final project logo was also decided upon. The Kick-Off Meeting concluded with thanks to the team for submitting an initial paper. Further information on the paper and its associated conference will follow shortly.

The entire TCDH team is looking forward to the project developments and future news about LODinG!