Semantic Co-Working Space
The SODa Semantic Co-Working Space (SCS) is a digital infrastructure comprising various tools for diverse tasks across the collection data lifecycle. It offers you many opportunities for networking, research, and learning. It was developed as part of the SODa project and serves as the technical foundation for the services, best practices, and content offered there.
Support for your collection data lifecycle
Various applications are available to users, enabling them to model, develop, transform, migrate, analyze, visualize, store, publish, enrich, or process data with programming code.
Conception & Planning
The conception and planning of cataloguing and digitisation projects is supported within the SCS through a collaborative office environment with Nextcloud. The integration of OnlyOffice and draw.io extends the usage context. Responsibilities and access can be organised via projects in the SCS.
Preparation & Enrichment
The content preparation of data includes, among other things, contextualisation through metadata, annotations, and relationships between objects. Ontologies can be edited in WebProtégé, while OpenRefine supports data cleaning and enrichment.
Structured Data
Users can create structured object and collection data using the ontology-based virtual research environment WissKI (Wissenschaftliche Kommunikationsinfrastruktur). The data is stored in an SQL database and a triplestore and can be analysed via JupyterHub.
Legal & Ethical Aspects
With regard to legal and ethical aspects, copyright and personality rights, data protection, and usage rights must be reviewed and documented in particular. In addition, open licences should be applied wherever possible, and ethical requirements should be observed by marking and protecting sensitive content.
Data Quality & Compatibility
The quality and compatibility of data is improved through the use of standards, authority data, and Linked Open Data. In WissKI, modelling is typically done using the ISO standard CIDOC CRM. For the base data model in the SCS (an implementation of the minimum dataset recommendation for museums and collections), this standard was extended.
FAIR Long-Term Availability
Long-term availability is ensured through WissKI repositories, which enable permanent, FAIR-compliant access to structured collection data through ontology-based data storage, automatic generation of persistent identifiers (PIDs), and provision of data via interfaces.
What SODa SCS can do for you
Applications accessible for you and your team in just a few clicks
The Semantic Co-Working Space is designed for people who work with scientific university collections. To use the SCS, you need to register for a new account. Access to all applications and instances is managed for each user via Single Sign-On (SSO) with a Keycloak account.
In addition, as part of an IAM4NFDI incubator fund, the option to log in via didmos (DAASI IdM with Open Source) was implemented, enabling connection to the authentication and authorisation infrastructure of the German Research Network (DFN-AAI).
This makes the SCS an integrated web environment that provides proven applications for digital work with collection data. This enables users to get started quickly, facilitates collaboration in complex contexts, and increases efficiency through preconfigured systems. Access can be extended to projects. This allows you to easily share access to your applications with other users in the SCS without having to create user accounts and manage their login credentials.
Simple collaboration and data integration
Web apps such as WissKI and cloud services such as Nextcloud enable you to work on your projects simultaneously and share data via shared folders between applications and with other users. You can use Nextcloud to create, edit, and manage office files, easily make them accessible in your JupyterHub via a shared folder, process them there with Python or OpenRefine, and import them into WissKI or other databases and publish them there.
Professional support from competent partners
In addition to regular workshops on using the SCS, our infrastructure team is available for all questions related to the SCS. Furthermore, the capabilities in the SCS are tailored to the requirements and expertise of our SODa subject matter experts. They provide content-related support for all questions around the collection data lifecycle and digital work with collection data in the SCS. For an introduction, please contact our infrastructure team, the helpdesk, or the relevant subject matter expert.
