NFDI4Objects Community Cluster (CC) Objects as Information Carriers

The Community Cluster Objects as Information Carriers of the National Research Data Infrastructure for Objects (NFDI4Objects) aims to provide an open platform for exchange for all those who conduct research in the field of epigraphy and pursue a material-oriented approach. The central focus of the cluster is the formulation of community-driven recommendations on how to digitally capture objects and inscriptions in a way that best serves the concerns of material-oriented research, adhering to the principles of FAIR and LOD as essential elements for the semantic web. A number of key aspects have already been identified at the regular meetings and workshops organised by the cluster. These include the precise recording of the positioning of the inscription(s) on the object, the relationships of the textual information to the object, to its immediate spatial context (and corresponding objects), to people and places. Other important criteria concern the temporal dimension and sequence of the inscription, as well as its relationship to the object design and decoration. The use of appropriately structured thesauri and vocabularies is essential for this. In a working group of the cluster, digital tools and services from various disciplines are being collected and compared using a checklist to map these criteria. The aim is also to identify ways in which existing resources can be utilised as sustainably as possible, for example through links in the sense of LOD. On the other hand, the results from ongoing projects based on graph-based data modelling can show future-oriented possibilities of how the different media information can be related multimodally for research analyses.