Development of Interfaces for Cultural Heritage Objects, Measures, Protected Sites, and Citizen Science Data

Description

The TRAIL aims to facilitate the exchange and reuse of heterogeneous heritage data, which is typically stored at the state level. A key challenge is that these extensive, dynamic datasets are stored in different, often proprietary IT systems and, to date, can only be exchanged manually between institutions (e.g., heritage authorities and research institutions). This creates significant obstacles for research, documentation, and long-term data preservation. To address this, the TRAIL is developing community standards and interfaces based, among other things, on the ADeX standard of the Association of the State Archaeologists of the Federal Republic of Germany. These define core and optional data fields, their types, and contents to enable interoperability and automated data exchange between systems. The interfaces are also intended to be semantically linked to the vocabularies of other TRAILs. The goal of the TRAIL is to create FAIR-compliant standards for for cultural heritage objects [1], measures, protected sites, and citizen science data. Through implementation and testing in the partner institutions’ systems, a sustainable foundation is being created for the standardized, efficient, and open exchange of cultural heritage data within the framework of the NFDI.

[1] A cultural heritage object refers to a data object that describes a geographically locatable point or area where at least one heritage conservation, archaeological, or paleontological finding exists or has existed. The term serves as an umbrella term for the fields of historic preservation, archaeology, and paleontology, and as an alias for the respective standard designations used by data holders. From a data perspective, it is an “object,” but it does not necessarily describe a physical object in the strict sense.