Research Goals

To make virtual collections of scholarly data from around the globe accessible through a common interface requires a means for making data interoperable across formats, disciplines, institutions, and technical paradigms.

In order to achieve this mission the ECAI community has worked together to identify existing tools, develop additional tools, and identify areas where further research and development will be required.

In most cases this research must be a partnership between scholars and technical experts. The process of designing the infrastructure and architecture of ECAI has contributed to a deeper understanding of the challenges of using technology in the humanities and social sciences.

Some areas where ECAI is currently defining research objectives and and pursuing research include:

  • International, distributed multi-lingual gazetteers
  • GIS in the humanities
    • The importance of the time element
    • The need for representation of fuzzy boundaries and incomplete information
  • Visualization
    • Data driven two and three dimensional representation of cultural information
  • Multi-lingual data access and representation
  • Data management of large collections of data in multiple formats
  • Metadata for cross collection access to data not just discovery