LAUDATIO-Repository.org - A Modular Approach of an Open Access Research Data Repository for a discipline

The presentation aims at presenting the LAUDATIO repository, a data repository for research data of historical corpus linguistics. It has a technical focus concerning the requirements that have been taken into consideration for the development of a repository infrastructure based on Fedora. Research data collections are expensive in terms of time, money and knowledge that is necessary to compile them. The scientists’ effort can be reduced by sharing these collections with a broader scientific community for re-use and re-evaluation. A common approach of creating sustainable and shareable data is the definition of existing and future open standards for the data creation and maintenance. The implementation and usage of digital repositories enables the management and distribution of that data. However, large collections of linguistic data, like corpora of deeply annotated text, pose unique challenges to repository design, which mainly arise due to the complexity of the applied data models. In the presentation a historical corpus linguistic data repository that is based on community-specific requirements and distinct user scenarios will be presented. Its main focus is on German historical texts including all dialects of time periods ranging from the 9th to the 19th century. The LAUDATIO repository is developed in the cause of a research data infrastructure project funded by the German Research Foundation from 2011 until 2014 at HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin within a cooperation of Computer and Media Service, the Departments of Historical Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics at HU Berlin, as well as INRIA, France. 1 The main objective for the technical implementation of the repository was to ensure the long-term access and preservation as well as the accessibility and the (re-)use of the heterogeneous research data. The requirements specification is essentially based on criteria such as the use of a complex data model for linguistic research data [Od13], their management, the structural collocation, the searchability, and long-term availability of the data. [Zi14] Exemplary technical requirements regarding these aspects and the implemented features of the repository infrastructure include: 1 LAUDATIO Repository: http://www.laudatio-repository.org [last access 26.06.2014]