Arts and Humanities E-Science Support Centre

TextGrid

Community Grid for the Humanities

Link

www.textgrid.de

Additional Resources

Project Duration: February 2006 - January 2009

TextGrid is one of the first grid-based humanities projects in Germany and Europe creating an infrastructure for the collaborative editing, annotation, analysis, and publication of specialist text resources. TextGrid represents the humanities in the German national grid initiative D-Grid (www.d-grid.de), and provides a digital infrastructure, a collective network, and a comprehensive and extensible toolset for text scholars. TextGrid forms a cornerstone in the emerging e-Humanities and moves existing e-Science expertise towards the Semantic Grid. Reaching out to the academic community, the project establishes a truly interdisciplinary platform and a virtual workbench for research.
Open interfaces open the door for other projects to plug into the TextGrid. Thus, any specialist in the humanities can adopt TextGrid for their work. In its core functionality, however, TextGrid focuses on (annotated) text as a data type since there is considerable demand in the community for processing text data. In spite of modern information technology and a clear thrust towards collaboration, researchers in the humanities can not currently make full use of the potentials of this development.

Text scientists, for example, researching into the relations between language and discourse and into the complex processes in the genesis of literature, still mostly work in local systems and project-oriented applications. Current research initiatives also lack integration with already existing text corpora, and they remain unconnected to resources such as dictionaries, lexica, secondary literature and text processing tools. This integration and interconnection, though, bears a wealth of opportunities. With its architecture and integrated tools that satisfy the specific requirements of text sciences, TextGrid is able to provide such forms of integration. Thus, TextGrid could transform the way scholars process, analyse, annotate, edit, and publish text data.

TextGrid Architecture

The need for the installation of a grid-enabled architecture in the e-Humanities is obvious for two reasons. On the one hand, past and current initiatives for digitising and accessioning texts have already accrued a considerable data volume, which exceeds hundreds of terabytes with more to be expected in the future. Grids are capable of handling these data volumes. On the other hand, establishing a community grid can effectively make up for the dispersal of the community as well as the scattering of resources and tools. Utilizing grid structures, a platform can be created that connects many experts in various areas and integrates numerous initiatives worldwide.

The overall architecture of TextGrid enhances a Globus-based grid infrastructure with a specific middleware layer and a service layer of specialised functionalities for textual processing including metadata and ontology management. Additional tools can be integrated at any time. While the TextGrid middleware operates as an interface between the low-level grid and the high-level services, the service layer itself is conceived as an open web service environment that will easily elicit participation in active community processes. An Eclipse-based interactive client ties all available services and tools together into a workbench and grants intuitive access for users. The general public can access published contents using a web interface. The usage of standards including TEI and the XML family, RDF, SOAP, WSDL 2.0, WSRF, SAML, LDAP, and BPEL fosters openness and interoperability.

TextGrid Team

Project Coordination

Goettingen State and University Library

Partner Institutions

• Technical University Darmstadt
• Institute for the German Language, Mannheim
• University of Trier
• University of Applied Sciences Worms
• University of Wuerzburg

Commercial Partners

• DAASI International GmbH, Tuebingen
• Saphor GmbH, Tuebingen

Funding body

TextGrid is partially funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the D-Grid initiative.