CENDARI: Establishing a digital ecosystem for historical research

Abstract

The CENDARI (Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure) project, which aims to create a research infrastructure for World War I and medieval history, is examined as a example digital ecosystem. The diverse information requirements of these two communities are met by a strategy which combines newly devised approaches to metadata and tools for data integration and ontology development. The ways in which this strategy produces an environment which conforms to the notion of a digital ecosystem is also examined.