Service-oriented Architectures (SOAs) for the Humanities: Solutions and Impacts

Large research infrastructure projects in the
Humanities and Social Sciences such as Bamboo
( http://www.projectbamboo.org/ ), CLARIN (
http://www.clarin.eu ), DARIAH ( http://ww
w.dariah.eu/ ), eAqua ( http://www.eaqua.net
/index.php ), Metanet ( http://www.meta-net.
eu ), and Panacea ( http://www.panacea-lr.eu
) increasingly offer their resources and tools as
web applications or web services via the internet.
Examples of this kind include:
- Bamboo Technology Project ( http://www.proje
ctbamboo.org/infrastructure/ )
- eAqua Portal ( http://www.eaqua.net/portal/ )
- Language Technology World Portal of MetaNet (
http://www.lt-world.org )
- PANACEA platform ( http://www.panacea-lr.e
u/en/project/the-platform )
- TextGrid – eScience methods in Arts and
Humanities ( http://www.textgrid.de/en.html
)
- VLO – Virtual Language Observatory ( http://ww
w.clarin.eu/vlw/observatory.php )
- WebLicht – Web Based Linguistic Chaining Tool
( http://https://weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebing
en.de/ )
Such web-based access has a number of crucial
advantages over traditional means of service
provision via downloadable resources or desktop
applications. Since web applications can be invoked
from any browser, downloading, installation, and
configuration of individual tools on the user’s
local computer is avoided. Moreover, users of web
applications will be ensured to always use the latest
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version of the software, since it will be updated on
the host computer. It is exactly this ease of use that
is of crucial advantage for eHumanities researchers,
since configuration and updates of software often
require computational skills that can ordinarily not
be expected from humanities researchers.
The paradigm of service-oriented architectures
(SOA) is often used as a possible architecture for
bundling web applications and web services. While
the use of web services and SOAs is quickly gaining
in popularity, there are still a number of open
technology and research questions which await more
principal answers:
- Currently, web services and SOAs in the
Digital Humanities often concentrate on written
material. Will the current technology scale up
to accommodate multimodal data like speech or
video data as well?
- Currently, web services and SOAs typically process
data in a synchronous fashion. How can very
large data sets such as multimodal resources be
processed in an asynchronous fashion?
- Currently, web services and SOAs tend to deliver
analysis or search results in a non-interactive
fashion, allowing user input only to initiate
processing and to react to the processing result.
How can the current applications be extended
so as to allow dynamic user interaction during
processing? Such considerations are of crucial
importance for the eHumanities in order to
support, inter alia, interactive annotation of
text corpora, a desideratum for all text-oriented
disciplines such as literary studies, history, and
linguistics.
- Will web-based access over time completely
replace stand-alone (downloadable) desktop or
CLI applications, or will there always be a need for
both: local and web-based applications?
- What is the impact of emerging technologies such
as web sockets or cloud computing on existing web
service environments?
- Currently, SOAs tend to be application or domain
specific, catering to the data formats and services
most relevant to particular user communities.
What are the possibilities for generalizing such
current practice and developing generic execution
models and standards?
- How to generate knowledge from data, e.g.
developing new digital methods and concepts such
as new and adapted data structures, hierarchical
data storage, data modeling, sorting and search
algorithms, selection of data via metadata, and
visualization tools?
1. Invited Speaker
- Eric Nyburg (Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh): A Service-Oriented Architecture for
Rapid Development of Language Applications
2. Accepted Papers
- Tara L. Andrews, Moritz Wissenbach, Joris J.
Van Zundert and Gregor Middell – Embracing
research: consolidating innovation through
sustainable development of infrastructure
- Dorothee Beermann, Pavel Mihaylov and Han
Sloetjes – Linking annotations Steps towards
tool-chaining in Language Documentation
- Andre Blessing, Jens Stegmann and Jonas Kuhn
– SOA meets Relation Extraction: Less may be
more in Interaction
- Michael Scott Cuthbert, Beth Hadley, Lars
Johnson and Christopher Reyes – Interoperable
Digital Musicology Research via music21 Web
Applications
- Emanuel Dima, Erhard Hinrichs, Marie Hinrichs,
Alexander Kislev, Thorsten Trippel and Thomas
Zastrow – Integration of WebLicht into the
CLARIN Infrastructure
- Rüdiger Gleim, Alexander Mehler and Alexandra
Ernst – SOA implementation of the eHumanities
Desktop
- Thomas Kisler, Florian Schiel and Han Sloetjes –
Signal processing via web services: the use case
WebMAUS
- Chiara Latronico, Nuno Freire, Shirley Agudo
and Andreas Juffinger – The European Library:
A Data Service Endpoint for the Bibliographic
Universe of Europe
- Przemyslaw Lenkiewicz, Dieter van Uytvanck,
Sebastian Drude and Peter Wittenburg
– Advanced Web-services for Automated
Annotation of Audio and Video Recordings
- Scott Martens – TüNDRA: TIGERSearch-style
treebank querying as an XQuery-based web
service
- Christoph Plutte – How to Turn a Desktop
Application into a Web-Interface? – ArchivEditor as an Example of Eclipse RCP and RAP
Single Sourcing
- Thomas Zastrow and Emanuel Dima – Workflow
Engines in Digital Humanities