The DCU research agenda

The Digital Curation Unit has set a medium- to long- term research agenda of addressing the entire set of digital curation processes with a multidisciplinary approach. We expect this to help us deal with problems of epistemic bias and achieve methodological enrichment and refinement.

Specific lines of work in the multi-year DCU research plan include:

• modelling digital curation processes;

• problems of representing domain knowledge in the form of ontologies and reference models;

• developing and maintaining knowledge resources and knowledge organization systems;

• streamlining the enrichment of these resources from text by extracting relevant entities and relations;

• ontology-driven search and fact discovery;

• automatically generating text from databases as a more human-oriented form of information, to be considered for preservation purposes in addition to communication;

• ensuring the ability to discover and access inter- and intra- domain associations and to overlay context-dependent interpretations;

• preserving contextual, schema and operational information in conjunction with primary data, so as to enable the use of databases containing valuable data over time;

• user community modelling and social tagging;

• conceptualizations of epistemic discourse and communication genres (i.e. rhetorical structure) in specific disciplinary and pragmatic contexts;

• grounded research on the motives, activities and contexts of appraisal, knowledge enhancement and use of digital resources by diverse interpretive communities;

• and, cost-benefit assessment of preservation policies.