Data journey through the DARIAH-PL e-infrastructure

Dariah.lab is a large scale infrastructure built for digital arts and humanities in Poland by members of the DARIAH-PL consortium. Its objective is to support data acquisition, storage and integration of research data of various forms and provenances, and to enable data processing, visualization and access to digital assets. The project is funded under the Smart Growth Operational Programme in the area "Development of modern research infrastructure of the science sector”.
Dariah.lab implements an idea represented by a new research and development model which removes boundaries between development activities in the ICT area and research in digital arts and humanities. It follows in the footsteps of the Time Machine project and its ambitious goal to develop a large scale digital information system that enables integration of numerous archives, museum collections and other cultural and historical assets.
During the Annual Event in 2021 we have introduced the DARIAH-PL project. This year we want to continue the story by describing Dariah.lab components and presenting how they are used to implement innovative research scenarios identified in the project.
Our presentation will have a form of a story about data and its journey through the Dariah.lab e-infrastructure. We focus on data, because it is one of the most important assets in many DARIAH-PL research scenarios. The concept of a journey helps us to deliver an easy to follow story about complex processing pipelines implemented in the e-infrastructure. Our intention is to present how data is created, identified, exposed, enriched, interlinked, analyzed and visualized by various Dariah.lab components. The aforementioned stages of data processing correspond to the steps of various research scenarios and at the same time determine the data’s journey through the e-infrastructure. In order to illustrate that processes we use an analogy to traveling from one place to another, with data being processed at each stop and with the final destination representing the desired outcome.
There are stages of the journey that are common for all data, even though they may be implemented in different ways for various data types. There are also components that are dedicated to specific types of data. Our presentation will cover these aspects by explaining how specific laboratories of the Dariah.lab e-infrastructure contribute to creation, enrichment or delivery of high quality FAIR-enabled data. Our main actor in the story - the data - is born, educated, kept safe and secure, and can collaborate with peers. We believe this metaphor will facilitate an understanding how Dariah.lab improves access to the DH research data.
The Dariah.lab functional components are grouped into five interconnected virtual laboratories for data acquisition, enrichment, semantic supervised discovery, analysis and interpretation, and visualization. Each of them constitutes a land with many stops on the infrastructure’s map that can be included on the data’s itinerary. The ultimate goal is to assist the DH scientists in conducting quality research. The variety of services provided by Dariah.lab allow for implementation of miscellaneous interdisciplinary scenarios involving various types of data, offering large research capacity and potential for conducting development projects.