Fostering FAIR and Open Data

Dr Anne Klammt has successfully applied for a Dataship from the Nfdi4objects consortium with a project dear to her heart. From July to 11 October, she will now be able to transfer, process and publish a collection of data that she compiled almost 25 years ago as part of her master's thesis on ancient Egyptian stone vessels from the settlement of Elephantine, Aswan. Given that this is an archaeological topic, the necessary work steps and the objective of publishing research data as FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) and Open Data can be directly transferred to the current challenges of HAIT.

There are a number of databases and collections at the HAIT that provide access to rich and valuable information and outcomes of earlier research. In many cases, however, they can only be opened on a few computers in the institute, which run software that has not been distributed for some time. Further use is also often limited because the data contained cannot yet be linked to authority data, Gazetteer or Wikidata. However, it is clear that enriching the data with geo-coordinates or biographical information from the common authority file (GND) could open up completely new perspectives on the data. The implementation of the archaeological project as part of the dataship therefore offers a gain in practical experience for research data management at HAIT. 

NFDI4Objects is an initiative to establish a multidisciplinary consortium within the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). The initiative is aimed at researchers and practitioners whose work focuses on the material heritage of around three million years of human and environmental history and addresses the challenges of modern research data infrastructures. The Dataship is a format created by Nfdi4objects to encourage the publication of data for the first time in 2024. The Dataship is endowed with 7500 € per project.