D7.4 Marketplace – Data population & curation

The SSH Open Marketplace is a discovery portal for digital tools, services, and methods in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), with an emphasis placed on placing these resources in their research context. It is the SSH component of the EOSC Marketplace. Previous initiatives have shown that curation of content is the key element to maintain the attractiveness and the utility of a discovery portal like the SSH Open Marketplace. Thus at each stage of the development of the Marketplace, from the first ingestion of existing catalogues to the curation sprint, curation has been at the heart of conception. This emphasis, based on previous examples and the work done throughout the SSHOC project, has led to profound changes in the data model, definition of quality criteria, standardization of the content as the team adapts the machinery of the Marketplace based on lessons learned. This continuous work has laid the foundation of the development of Editorial Guidelines which will be used by future curation actors as well as the definition of their different curation roles and the organisation of their relationship.

Two different methods are being used to populate the Marketplace: integration of a batch of entries, called “mass ingestion”, or individual contributions. Even though general criteria remain similar, the curation processes are different and the tools used are not the same. For instance, to be able to curate a large number of entries, it is necessary to rely on automatized controls. In both cases, a specific module, called “curation dashboard”, has to be developed to monitor and facilitate the curation process.

A key added value of the Marketplace is the possibility of linking different entries, to provide context. For instance, a tool can be linked to a training or a publication that helps researchers understand how they can use that tool to advance their research. The ability to link Marketplace entries allows the creation of special entries called Workflows. The idea is to create a step by step procedure to accomplish a research task, like a transcription of a digitized corpus, and to be able to associate entries from the Marketplace to each step (e.g. tools). As this kind of object has some specificities regarding curation, a section is dedicated to them.

Another important part of the curation process is to maintain over time “semantic artefacts” used to access to Marketplace entries like concepts and more generally vocabularies.

This document describes all these curation components (criteria, tools, organisation of actors, management of vocabularies etc.) developed during the SSHOC project into task 7.4 in close coordination with other tasks from WP7 and beyond (e.g WP3). It represents the basis for the future functioning of the curation of the Marketplace after the end of the project in complementarity to the general governance of the Marketplace expressed in SSHOC D7.5 Marketplace - Governance.