Theme

PARTHENOS | Virtual Research Environment


An online environment that integrates cloud storage with services and tools and support collaborative working throughout the research data lifecycle, promoting sharing, reuse and sustainability within the Humanities.

Motivations

This VRE has resulted from the PARTHENOS project which has worked with the key ERICs and RIs in the Humanities to identify commonalities across the different disciplines, focussing on these to provide common policies and standards, and providing access to the tools and services that enable cross-disciplinary research. Whilst PARTHENOS has created some of these tools (e.g. the Policy Wizard and the SSK), most originate from other sources and are those most commonly used by researchers in their day to day work.

The FAIR Principles have been widely adopted throughout the Humanities and form the basis of both the guidelines produced for researchers and data repositories to manage their data by the project as well as providing a framework for the policies applied to the VRE which are geared towards making data as findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable as possible.

A key aspect of the VRE towards reaching the FAIR goals has been the use of the Backbone Thesaurus (BBT), a minimal metadata set, for the Joint Resource Registry which end users can search for items of interest. As well, the PARTHENOS Entity Model (PEM) (of which the BBT is a sub-set) provides a highly flexible schema that is able to map many of the existing schemas in use by cultural heritage organisations and covers a wide range of entities which include not just data but software, organisations and people. More in-depth search facilities are also provided which uses the PEM metadata.

The PARTHENOS VRE:

supports researchers to perform multi-disciplinary research with an online collaborative environment that integrates:

  • built-in tools and services with access to other widely-used external tools, 
  • a cloud service for storing data and documents,
  • two powerful search mechanisms for finding the various items provided (tools, data, etc.),
  • Persistent identifiers for datasets,
  • Social media environment for shared communication. 

PARTHENOS makes it very easy for a researcher to upload and register their datasets for reuse within their community. By completing a simple form which records the minimal but necessary items of information needed for the registry, such as ownership and reuse status, the dataset becomes ‘Findable’, ‘Accessible’ and ‘Reusable’. 

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VRE Features

Discovery

The Discovery services make accessible to users the aggregated Research Infrastructures metadata compliant with the PARTHENOS Entity Model (PEM), providing faceted and advanced search capabilities as well as the possibility to browse search.

Text-analytics

Text-analytics services provide users with a rich set of Text-analytics services (e.g. Part-of-speech tagging, Parsers, NER, Opinion Mining etc.) as well as services for reference resources integration and merging.

Visual Media

Visual Media makes accessible to users an easy-to-use way for publishing advanced multimedia content on the Web, to upload visual media files on a server and to automatically transform them into an efficient web format, making them ready for the web.

Experiment with the PARTHENOS VRE

Experiment with the PARTHENOS VRE

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