Research Scope
The two axes or perspectives, Community Practices and Semantic Interoperability, are treated as common threads throughout this thesis. Some of the research questions, hypotheses, and objectives formulated are rather for one or the other perspective, others involve both.
Research Questions, Hypotheses, and Objectives
| Research Question | Hypothesis | Objectives |
| RQ01: How does Linked Open Usable Data (LOUD) situate itself with respect to Digital Humanities (DH)? Does LOUD has affected or will affect the perception of Linked Data for Cultural Heritage? | HYP01: Specifications that follow the LOUD design principles are more likely to be accepted because they are grassroots driven and based on consensus and transparency. Nevertheless, the LOUD acronym is not that well-known yet and its standards, especially IIIF, are still perceived as mere technical means, being part of overall infrastructures and not necessarily belonging to a larger sociotechnical ecosystem. |
OBJ01: Situating LOUD and its epistemological foundations for CH and DH |
| RQ02: What are the sociotechnical requirements for developing specifications in line with the LOUD design principles? |
HYP02: Grassroots initiatives to establish functional communities take significant commitment from all sides and are frequently developed slowly since the majority of those participating or interested can only be extensively committed for brief periods of time. However, the efforts undertaken within these initiatives, such as the development of LOUD-compatible standards, are generally successful in the medium to long term. |
OBJ02: Reporting on the interactions that Linked Art and IIIF undertake in consensus building and advocacy work |
| OBJ03: Providing an overview of the adoption of LOUD standards within the CH domain and its potential with regard to scientific movements and principles, such as Open Science, Citizen Science, FAIR and CARE | ||
| RQ03: To what extent can knowledge be modelled with Linked Art? | HYP03: To what extent can knowledge be modelled with Linked Art? Linked Art has the capacity to make various insights and sources of truth generated on and around a variety of entities. Additional vocabularies and different vocabularies from the Getty, i.e. AAT, ULAN, TGN, may need to be used or created, however. What is also complementary to Linked Art but loses semantic value is to also make assertions using WADM that go outside of purely descriptive narratives. | OBJ04: Experimenting with Linked Art in terms of knowledge representation, taking into consideration various niche use cases. |
| RQ04: How can we assess whether IIIF and Linked Art APIs facilitate reuse and ex- ternal participation? |
HYP04: Digital infrastructures that rely on the deployment of shared APIs, such as the IIIF and Linked Art specifications, stand a better chance of providing long-term accessibility and data re-usability. |
OBJ05: Creating a comprehensive criteria list for evaluating the re-usability of shared APIs |
| OBJ06: Assessing the deployment of LOUD standards by implementing IIIF APIs, the WADM as well as a Linked Art API which can co-exist on top of an existing infrastructure | ||
| RQ05: How easy-to-adopt and scalable are LOUD standards for Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs)? |
HYP05: While the implementation of LOUD standards, such as IIIF, have become increasingly easier to implement, they are still challenging for the CH domain, as the required skills and resources are often lacking within CHIs and when deployed, these standards are generally deployed only in a limited manner. |
OBJ07: Reporting how Yale has rolled out LOUD standards on a large scale |
| OBJ08: Checking the Linked Art data consistency on the LUX platform |