Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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subsystems can beg<strong>in</strong> to merge <strong>in</strong>to one larger eHumanities DE while still ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g their <strong>in</strong>dividual
characters and strengths” (Aschenbrenner et al. 2009). Two prerequisites for such successful
<strong>in</strong>teroperability, they argue, are “loosely coupled services” and the “visibility of resources.” While they
proposed a reference ontology for both services and documents <strong>in</strong> eHumanities, they stressed that any
<strong>in</strong>frastructure design also must take user needs <strong>in</strong>to account and ideally have users <strong>in</strong>volved from the
very beg<strong>in</strong>n<strong>in</strong>g. “Novel <strong>in</strong>frastructure that is imposed on the user will fail,” Aschenbrenner et al.
predicted; “TextGrid has doma<strong>in</strong> experts as core partners <strong>in</strong> the team, and these experts are shap<strong>in</strong>g
issues such as standards and community-build<strong>in</strong>g” (Aschenbrenner et al. 2009).
TextGrid thus made use of both doma<strong>in</strong> experts and computer scientists <strong>in</strong> terms of def<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g standards
for their project, and Aschenbrenner et al. reported that TextGrid has used noth<strong>in</strong>g but open standards
to promote the fullest amount of <strong>in</strong>teroperability. They also took <strong>in</strong>to account the three <strong>in</strong>teroperability
layers identified by the European Information Framework: “technical, semantic, and organizational”
(Aschenbrenner et al. 2009). Earlier research by the TextGrid group had highlighted the challenges of
both syntactic and semantic differences <strong>in</strong> humanities data sets <strong>in</strong> terms of achiev<strong>in</strong>g mean<strong>in</strong>gful data
<strong>in</strong>tegration. “In the humanities, the major obstacle to data <strong>in</strong>teroperability is syntactic and semantic
heterogeneity,” Dimitriadis et al. stated, add<strong>in</strong>g that “roughly speak<strong>in</strong>g, it is the differences <strong>in</strong>
term<strong>in</strong>ology that make it so difficult to cross the boundaries and create a jo<strong>in</strong>t doma<strong>in</strong> of language
resources that can be utilized seamlessly” (Dimitriadis et al. 2006). Similar research by Shen et al.
(2008) had reported that two major types of <strong>in</strong>teroperability challenges for digital libraries were
syntactic and semantic, with syntactic be<strong>in</strong>g at the level of applications and semantic <strong>in</strong>teroperability
as the “knowledge-level <strong>in</strong>teroperability” that allows digital libraries to be <strong>in</strong>tegrated and <strong>in</strong>cludes “the
ability to bridge semantic conflicts aris<strong>in</strong>g from differences <strong>in</strong> implicit mean<strong>in</strong>gs, perspectives, and
assumptions, thus creat<strong>in</strong>g a semantically compatible <strong>in</strong>formation environment.”
Although the development and use of standards to promote <strong>in</strong>teroperability were called for by many
projects such as TextGrid, other research, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g that by the LaQuAT project, has po<strong>in</strong>ted out that
standards have their limits as well:
While there are a variety of standardisation activities with the aim of <strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>teroperability
between digital resources and enabl<strong>in</strong>g them to be used <strong>in</strong> comb<strong>in</strong>ation, standardisation alone is
unlikely to solve all problems related to l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g up data. Humanists still have to deal with
legacy data <strong>in</strong> diverse and often obsolete formats, and even when standards are used the sheer
variety of data and research means that there is a great deal of flexibility <strong>in</strong> how the standards
are applied. Moreover, standards are generally developed with<strong>in</strong> particular discipl<strong>in</strong>es or
doma<strong>in</strong>s, whereas research is often <strong>in</strong>ter-discipl<strong>in</strong>ary, mak<strong>in</strong>g use of varied materials, and
<strong>in</strong>corporat<strong>in</strong>g data conform<strong>in</strong>g to different standards. There will <strong>in</strong>evitably be diversity of
representation when <strong>in</strong>formation is gathered together from different doma<strong>in</strong>s and for different
purposes, and consequently there will always be a need to <strong>in</strong>tegrate this diversity (Hedges
2009).
Hedges argued that the realities of legacy data <strong>in</strong> the humanities, the differ<strong>in</strong>g application of standards,
and the doma<strong>in</strong> specificity of many standards necessitate the design of <strong>in</strong>frastructure solutions that can
<strong>in</strong>tegrate diverse data. He suggested that research by the grid community on the “<strong>in</strong>tegration of
structured <strong>in</strong>formation” and turn<strong>in</strong>g data repositories <strong>in</strong>to “virtualized data resources” on a grid may
allow digital repositories to hide the “heterogeneity of digital objects” from their users, rather than
try<strong>in</strong>g to force all data <strong>in</strong>to one standard. Whatever solutions are pursued, this section has <strong>in</strong>dicated