Towards a scientific annotation service by subscription

This project proposes to lay the foundation for commercialising an annotation tool developed in Hintze’s MUYA-IIIF Proof of Concept project, using the vehicle of a new digital repository for previously unpublished sources held at the Royal Asiatic Society in London. 

A partnership between SOAS, the German non-profit company Data Futures GmbH (DF) and DF’s U.K. company Brightlights Intellectual Property Limited (BLIP) will create a repository, hosted on DF’s servers, for the notebooks of Edward William West, previously digitised via Hintze’s ERC Advanced Grant MUYA (2016–2023). We will use the state-of-the-art Open Repository platform, InvenioRDM, on which the European Commission’s OpenAIRE Zenodo global repository for research data is based. InvenioRDM was developed by a CERN-led consortium of which DF is a prominent member.

Using these emerging standards, the project will build on the infrastructure and digital material from MUYA-IIIF to create a new corpus repository and demonstrate a commercial annotation service. These developments will gain unprecedented sustainability through open standards adoption, compared with existing generations of digital infrastructure, with important implications—enabling publicly-accessible digital heritage resources to be continually enhanced over long periods (compared with existing short-lived website strategies) for the first time, and for SOAS research data services to become prominent internationally.