SND continues to be successful in its work on international projects. In November and January, SHADE and ATRIUM, two major initiatives in the fields of arts and humanities, will commence. The foundation for these projects is ARIADNE RI, a research infrastructure with a portal that aggregates data and tools primarily in the field of archaeology.
“All stakeholders in the projects are very pleased and proud to receive funding from the EU to ensure the further development of ARIADNE Portal. The competition was fierce. In the case of SHADE, for example, there were 90 applicants, and we were one of only five collaborations to be awarded funding,” says Ulf Jakobsson, research data advisor and coordinator of SND's involvement in both projects.
Long-term funding is needed
The purpose of SHADE is to develop a more permanent way to finance the continued operations of ARIADNE. The ARIADNE Portal holds metadata for and links to a vast amount of archaeological and historical material from various European institutions, such as SND, the British ADS, and the Dutch DANS. The portal also provides researchers with training materials and various tools, primarily developed for archaeology but useful in other disciplines.
Currently, ARIADNE RI (as the European collaboration is formally known) is a non-profit organization financed through membership fees and temporary project funding. However, the goal is to set up a long-term collaboration model. The budget for this initiative is just over 1.4 million Swedish kronor over a one-year development period.
ATRIUM: A more extensive project
ATRIUM is a more extensive project, with 29 partners concentrated around a consortium of four major research infrastructures. In addition to ARIADNE RI, the consortium includes DARIAH (arts and humanities), CLARIN (language), and OPERAS (social sciences and humanities). SND is involved in ARIADNE's part of the project, which covers about six million Swedish kronor over four years. SND is responsible for approximately 1.7 million Swedish kronor, equivalent to a full-time position over a total of 16.5 months.
“Much of what SND will contribute with is IT development. This involves to develop various technologies for processing, analyzing, and visualizing data, primarily in archaeology but also from other research fields,” says Ulf Jakobsson.
Increased usage among researchers
An important purpose of ATRIUM is to make resources on platforms like the ARIADNE Portal more widely known and used by researchers in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. New tools will be created and existing resources, like 3DHOP, will be further developed. Other goals for the ATRIUM project include simplified access to the infrastructures; improved metadata quality in existing catalogues and databases; efforts to create more educational and training materials; and increased use of controlled vocabularies and ontologies for better interoperability between different systems.
“In general, we hope that thanks to ATRIUM, researchers will start using digital methods more extensively. The various tools in the portal should make it easier to showcase and analyze research data in formats such as 3D, audio, and video,” concludes Ulf Jakobsson.