Advanced Research Data Environment for the Arts and Humanities (ARDEAH)
ARDEAH broadens access to established Open Research Data practices and tools for cultural heritage data, making them usable for a wide community beyond data modelling specialists. The project strengthens interoperability, community engagement, and sustainable data practices while addressing key challenges related to AI-generated research data.
The Advanced Research Data Environment for the Arts and Humanities (ARDEAH) project aims to broaden access to an established Open Research Data (ORD) framework of practices, components, and toolsets for the creation, publication, and reuse of cultural heritage data. Its core objective is to make ORD approaches usable beyond a narrow community of data modelling specialists, thereby enabling wider adoption across the arts and humanities research ecosystem.
As Open Research Data has become a fundamental prerequisite for sustainable research infrastructures in the humanities, the Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (SARI) and its partners have developed robust practices, ontological frameworks, and strategies for managing cultural heritage data from museums, archives, and collections. ARDEAH systematically builds on these foundations and aims to increase their visibility, accessibility, and uptake, particularly among non-academic cultural heritage institutions, which hold the majority of primary research data for art history and related disciplines.
The project specifically aims at community engagement and capacity building. Through training events and educational materials, SARIs Semantic Reference Data Modelling framework is made accessible to non-expert users by means of an improved, intuitive user interface for publishing, assessing, and re-using semantic data models. In parallel, ARDEAH strengthens interoperability with key national and international research data infrastructures and other stakeholders, notably DaSCH and potential future EOSC partners. In doing so, the project enhances the integration and visibility of Swiss cultural heritage data within European research networks.
In addition, ARDEAH addresses emerging challenges related to the use of artificial intelligence in cultural heritage research. The project aims to establish a sustainable ontological framework for documenting the provenance of Machine Learning (ML) and AI-generated data, with particular emphasis on transparency, traceability, and reusability of machine learning classifications. Within this scope, ARDEAH also explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to support automated metadata generation and to produce accessible textual descriptions that facilitate the understanding and reuse of provenance information.
ARDEAH is led by the University of Zurich (Swiss Art Research Infrastructure, SARI) as the leading house, in close collaboration with ETH Zurich (gta Digital), the Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab), DaSCH (University of Basel), and Takin.Solutions. By extending ORD practices beyond academia, the project contributes to interdisciplinary innovation and strengthens international collaboration in the arts and humanities.
The project is generously funded by swissuniversities.