Digital Provenance Research, Methods, Concepts, and Standard Data on Personal Names

Description

The focus of the TRAIL is on recording the names of individuals and institutions in their various roles in relation to the object, which is fundamental to valid provenance data and provenance research as a whole. Two challenges in particular arise in connection with this data. The first involves recording little-known and poorly documented individuals for whom no identifier exists in a common authority vocabulary (such as GND, Getty ULAN, etc.), and for whom, due to the scarcity of information, none can be established in such vocabularies. Here, the TRAIL explores mapping possibilities and takes different approaches. On the one hand, mapping in specialized vocabularies and their potential applications across a broad spectrum are being tested on an experimental basis. On the other hand, during the first phase of the TRAIL, experiments were already conducted with modeling a dedicated provenance Wikibase instance for these purposes, which maps individuals, institutions, and objects together. In the future, the interoperability of this Wikibase with Factgrid will be explored, and the recording of individuals using Wikidata will be tested on sample datasets. The second issue concerns the need to document uncertainties and ambiguities regarding individuals, which are of enormous importance for research questions. A workshop on this topic was already held during the first phase of the TRAIL, and its findings are now to be incorporated into a paper.