DYAS: The Greek research Infrastructure network for the humanities

Panos Constantopoulos, Costis Dallas
Conference on Cultural Heritage and new technologies, Vienna, Austria, November 2013
2013
Conference/Workshop
Abstract. The mission of DYAS, the Greek Research Infrastructure Network for the Humanities, is to support the Greek communities of humanities researchers in advancing their work using ICT and in exchanging knowledge and working practices; to broaden the scope of and opportunities for research through the interconnection of various distributed digital resources; and to promote the access, use, creation and long-term preservation of research data, both primary and secondary, in digital form. DYAS is also charged to operate as the Greek component of the European Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities, DARIAH. DYAS is designed as a distributed infrastructure with members at distinct levels of involvement: management nodes, providing the services of the infrastructure and setting the specifications for digital resources( currently, the Academy of Athens and the DCU, R.C. Athena); curators, responsible for specific collections and added-value repositories; affiliates, providing selected metadata for ingestion by the management nodes. In addition to members, external users can subscribe to specific services of the network, thus widely offering the benefits of DYAS and DARIAH services to researchers, educators and collection managers. By promoting standards, interoperability frameworks, common practices, authorities and services, DYAS intends to foster multidisciplinary activities and to establish links with thematic infrastructures, such as ARIADNE. The services being developed by DYAS fall in four groups: (1) sharing digital resources through a set of data, person, metadata, vocabulary and software registries; (2) support for resource development, through a series of guidelines and specialized tools; (3) contributing to DARIAH services, by participating in specific tasks of the Virtual Competency Centres; and (4) a digital humanities observatory to support continuous monitoring and recording of the advances in the field and to undertake dissemination actions. The service architecture involves layers of common curation and interoperability services and employs cloud computation and data management services.