ROSSIO Infrastructure: A Digital Humanities Platform to Explore the Portuguese Cultural Heritage

Abstract

The ROSSIO Infrastructure is developing a free and open-access platform for aggregating, organising, and connecting the digital resources in the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities provided by Portuguese higher education and cultural institutions. This paper presents an overview of the ROSSIO Infrastructure, its main objectives, the institutions involved, and the services offered by the infrastructure’s aims through its platform—namely, a discovery portal, digital exhibitions, collections, and a virtual research environment. These services rely on a metadata-aggregation solution for bringing the digital objects’ metadata from the providing institutions into ROSSIO. The aggregated datasets are converted into linked data and undergo an enrichment process based on controlled vocabularies, which are developed and published by ROSSIO. The paper will describe this process, the applications involved, and how they interoperate. We will further reflect on how these services may enhance the dissemination of science, considering the FAIR principles.

Keywords

• digital infrastructures
• metadata aggregation
• controlled vocabularies
• digital humanities
• ICT tools
• Social Sciences