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KONDA - Continuous quality management of dynamic research data on objects of material culture using the LIDO standard

Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (2019-2022).

The aim of this project is a systematic quality assurance of structured research data on objects of material culture, not only during data collection but continuously over the entire life cycle of data. To this end, a generic quality management process for dynamic, partly uncertain research data will first be developed. This will be applied to the internationally recognized harvesting format Lightweight Information Describing Objects (LIDO), transferred to concrete application contexts for the arts and cultural studies, and tested on selected datasets. The resulting quality management processes for the respective contexts will be documented in manuals and made available to the relevant communities.

The relevant fields of activity of the project partners complement each other ideally: The German Documentation Center for Art History - Bildarchiv Foto Marburg contributes its long-standing expertise in data modeling and acquisition of objects of material culture in an art historical context, the development and communication of indexing standards (including LIDO), and the aggregation of heterogeneous data holdings. The main focus of the work of the Research and Development Department of the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB) is the establishment and development of digital research infrastructures, with particular attention to the interoperability of metadata on objects in the arts and cultural studies. Specifically, the SUB pursues LIDO's further development in active collaboration with national and international expert bodies. This ensures a broad anchoring of the project in the community as well as the feedback of the results into the international standard. We provide the conceptual basis and set the framework for the project by applying the techniques and methods for quality management commonly used in computer science to the cultural science domains and developing them further for this purpose.

Our subproject goal is a generic quality management process for dynamic research data, some of which is uncertain. The central process activities are the definition of the targeted data quality based on a catalog of criteria, the examination of the existing data quality based on different analysis techniques, and the quality improvement based on a catalog of improvement actions. All these activities are interrelated, i.e., analyses are performed based on selected quality criteria and improvements are performed based on analysis results. In addition to data quality, quality assurance of the data models and transformations involved is also considered. The process is continuous, as it should accompany the entire lifetimes of dynamic data, data models, and transformations, i.e., keep their quality permanently high.
Since the quality management of uncertain data in general has not been investigated much so far, new modeling as well as quality analysis techniques and improvement measures are developed in our subproject especially for this task.

Cooperation partners

Dr. Christian Bracht (Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte - Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)
Dipl. Math. Regine Stein (Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen)

Project collaborator in the workgroup

Viola Wenz

Further Information

KONDA at Zenodo
KONDA at Twitter
Project website DDK
Project website SUB
List of research projects on curation criteria and quality standards of research data of the BMBF