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.

Cultural heritage on the Semantic Web: The Europeana Data Model

“…The data model was consolidated with some partners, such as the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and the Digital Public Library of America, which adopted the Europeana Data Model as the basis for their data models (Petras et al, 2017). 21 The more recent infrastructure ROSSIO, 22 ‘a free and open-access platform for aggregating, organizing, and connecting the digital resources in the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities provided by Portuguese higher education and cultural institutions’ (Silva et al, 2022: 1), has adopted a Europeana Data Model profile that is capable of representing digital objects from different domains defined by Portuguese academic and cultural heritage institutions.…”

5th Interdisciplinary and Virtual Conference on Arts in Education

“…For instance, my recent teaching activities have been shaped by my experience as part of the ROSSIO Infrastructure team, a digital research infrastructure in the social sciences, arts, and humanities, the largest of its kind in Portugal (Silva et al, 2022), where I had the opportunity to develop and curate new public outreach products including digital exhibitions and collections, most of which are related to expressive culture, including music and dance 1 . Following up on this experience, I have already reflected on the perks of adopting storytelling strategies in my teaching in the M.A.…”