TRIPLE: A European discovery platform for the SSH

The richness of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) lies in the fact that they encompass a multi-tude of disciplines and languages. The resulting specialization makes it possible to examine an immense range of SSH topics with different methods and from different perspectives. However, this also leads to separation into individual disciplines and areas. In combination with a highly fragmented publication landscape (OPERAS Consortium 2017), this prevents SSH research from reaching its full potential. In comparison with STM (science, technology and mathematics), the use and reuse of SSH research is suboptimal (see e.g. Nicolaisen & Frandsen 2019). Interdisciplinary collaboration possibilities are more often missed, and as a result, societal, economic, and academic impacts are limited.

Conceptually, there is a wealth of transdisciplinary collaborations, but in practice there is a need to help SSH researchers and research institutions to connect and support them, to prepare the research data for these overarching approaches and to make them findable and usable.

TRIPLE aims at designing and developing the European discovery platform dedicated to SSH re-sources. It develops new ways to conduct, connect and discover research and will offer a full multilingual and multicultural solution for the discovery and the reuse of SSH resources. The platform will provide linked exploration thanks to a search engine specifically developed for the SSH and a variety of con-nected innovative tools (visualisation, annotation, trust building system, crowdfunding, social networks and recommender system). TRIPLE focuses on subject-specific and multilingual diversity on the one hand, and on the other hand enables researchers to identify not only data, but also other scientists and projects in the European research area across subject and language boundaries, and to reuse the data generated in these project contexts.

Questions to work on in this case are, which challenges do different humanities disciplines have to deal with, if they want to make their data digitally available for research? Should the data be based on stand-ards that are as far-reaching as possible, or should they above all reflect the specific methods, ap-proaches and languages in the respective disciplines? How do we deal with the variance of approaches in the humanities to make data visible and how big are the scopes for variances?

18 European partners from twelve countries (universities, non-university research and infrastructure institutions, European infrastructures, publishers) are involved in the development of the TRIPLE plat-form and the delivery of the data. The aim is to become a core service of the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud). To make the platform possible, SSH data will be enriched and standardized. Therefore, the project facilitates the creation of FAIR data (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable data) and produces FAIR data itself. The meta data vocabulary will be expanded on the basis of multilingual the-sauri. Semantic annotations will be based for example on the RAMEAU (for French), LCSH (for English), Spanish Biblioteca Nationale Espana and the Deutsche National Bibliothek (for German). In addition, named entity recognition tools (NERD) will be used to enable a discovery tool for Citizen Sciences (such as Wikidata). TRIPLE will be a dedicated service of OPERAS Research Infrastructure and become a strong service in the EOSC marketplace.

TRIPLE will make it much easier for scientists, citizens and business organizations to access scientific publications, data, data processing platforms and data processing services and therefore to gain from Open Science. To this end, the solution will be co-designed involving different stakeholders. Further-more, TRIPLE will not only offer a discovery tool for end users through a web interface, but will also offer various APIs, improving discoverability of its content on other platforms.