baureka.online - A Central Research Data Hub for Building Archaeology

With baureka.online the Chair of Architectural History at RWTH Aachen University, the Department of Building History and History of Urban Development at the TU Berlin and FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure are in the process of setting up a subject-specific digital portal that will allow  an effective search, secure archiving and sustainable publication of research data for researchers and practitioners from the field of Building Archaeology and its related disciplines.

Building Archaeology studies built structures, their genesis and their further development in a historical perspective. The results of these studies are large volumes of heterogeneous data in a wide variety of different formats. Despite the amount of data generated in the course of the respective projects there is still a lack of portals and platforms to archive, publish, search and exchange these data.

The goal of baueka.online therefore is to provide digital architectural documentation to a wider range of players concerned with historic buildings and to promote synergies between scholarly research, heritage preservation and architectural practice by improving the findability and reusability of research data.

The development of the platform started in 2021 and is being funded by the DFG.

Our poster will illustrate baureka.online, its single components and their independency. It will also display how baureka.online will support the digital transformation in the field of Building Archaeology and establish the format of research data publications.

• baureka.storage will provide a repository for storing and publishing primary research data with DOIs.
• baureka.index will establish a catalogue of published research data with cross-institutional references. This will allow users to search for data published in baureka.online but also for information about data in other sources.
• A newly-developed metadata schema will make it possible to describe research data with subject specific criterias.
• baureka.online will also ensure that the published data is findable and reusable and complies with FAIR principles.

The poster will also present the intentions for the second funding period:

• With baureka.publications, a data journal will be integrated into the portal, enabling building archaeologists to publish selected data sets comprehensively and in an appropriate manner.