Semantic Archive Integration for Holocaust Research. The EHRI Research Infrastructure

Abstract

The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) is a large-scale EU project that involves 23 institutions and archives working on Holocaust studies, from Europe, Israel and the US. In its first phase (2011-2015) it aggregated archival descriptions and materials on a large scale and built a Virtual Research Environment (portal) for Holocaust researchers based on a graph database. In its second phase (2015-2019), EHRI-2 seeks to enhance the gathered materials using semantic approaches: enrichment, co-referencing, interlinking. Semantic integration involves four of the 14 EHRI-2 work packages and helps integrate databases, free text, and metadata to interconnect historical entities (people, organizations, places, historic events) and create networks. We will present some of the EHRI-2 technical work, including critical issues we have encountered.