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Digital data on tangible and intangible cultural assets is an essential part of daily life, communication and experience. It has a lasting influence on the perception of cultural identity as well as on the interactions between research, the cultural economy and society. Throughout the last three decades, many cultural heritage institutions have contributed a wealth of digital representations of cultural assets (2D digital reproductions of paintings, sheet music, 3D digital models of sculptures, monuments, rooms, buildings), audio-visual data (music, film, stage performances), and procedural research data such as encoding and annotation formats. The long-term preservation and FAIR availability of research data from the cultural heritage domain is fundamentally important, not only for future academic success in the humanities but also for the cultural identity of individuals and society as a whole. Up to now, no coordinated effort for professional research data management on a national level exists in Germany. NFDI4Culture aims to fill this gap and create a user-centered, research-driven infrastructure that will cover a broad range of research domains from musicology, art history and architecture to performance, theatre, film, and media studies. The research landscape addressed by the consortium is characterized by strong institutional differentiation. Research units in the consortium's community of interest comprise university institutes, art colleges, academies, galleries, libraries, archives and museums. This diverse landscape is also characterized by an abundance of research objects, methodologies and a great potential for data-driven research. In a unique effort carried out by the applicant and co-applicants of this proposal and ten academic societies, this community is interconnected for the first time through a federated approach that is ideally suited to the needs of the participating researchers. To promote collaboration within the NFDI, to share knowledge and technology and to provide extensive support for its users have been the guiding principles of the consortium from the beginning and will be at the heart of all workflows and decision-making processes. Thanks to these principles, NFDI4Culture has gathered strong support ranging from individual researchers to high-level cultural heritage organizations such as the UNESCO, the International Council of Museums, the Open Knowledge Foundation and Wikimedia. On this basis, NFDI4Culture will take innovative measures that promote a cultural change towards a more reflective and sustainable handling of research data and at the same time boost qualification and professionalization in data-driven research in the domain of cultural heritage. This will create a long-lasting impact on science, cultural economy and society as a whole.

The paper introduces into a new Science Gateway, developed in the framework of the European Horizon 2020 project EGI Engage - DARIAH Competence Centre, which started in March 2015 co-funded by the European Union, with the participation of about 70 (research) units in over 30 countries. In this paper the authors focus on trans-disciplinary collaboration in the framework of explorative lexicography in cultural context. On the one hand, they give a short overview of the architecture of the Science Gateway, used techniques, and specific applications and services developed during the DARIAH Competence Centre. On the other they mainly focus on possible added value and changes concerning work flow for Lexicographers and researchers on Lexical resources. This is exemplified on the European network of COST action IS 1305 “European Network of electronic lexicography (ENeL)”.

DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, is a large user community that gathers scientists across Europe from the research field of the Arts and Humanities (A). The aim of DARIAH is to enhance and support digitally-enabled research and teaching across the Arts and Humanities in Europe. The objective of DARIAH is to develop, maintain and operate a research infrastructure for ICT-based research practices. The DARIAH infrastructure aims to become a fully connected and effective network of tools, information, people and methodologies for investigating, exploring and supporting research across the broad spectrum of the Digital Humanities. To achieve this goal, a significant amount of effort has to be devoted to the improvement of the current infrastructure. A part of this effort is the EGI-DARIAH Competence Centre (EGI-DARIAH CC), established within the EGI-Engage Horizon2020 project. The EGI-DARIAH CC aims at bridging the gap between the DARIAH user community and the European e-Infrastructure, mainly those provided by the EGI community. To achieve this goal, EGI-DARIAH CC focuses on strengthening the collaboration between the DARIAH user community and EGI by deploying A applications in the EGI Federated cloud and increasing the number of e-Science services and applications, as well as raising awareness of A researchers about the advantages and benefits of e-Infrastructure by providing end-user support and organizing training events. Considering that the DARIAH community, as well as the general A research public, is very specific in their requirements and needs on e-Infrastructure, one of the first actions of the EGI DARIAH CC was to collect all relevant information about the DARIAH research requirements. The collection of the required information was conducted via a comprehensive web-based survey. The aim of this survey was to collect feedback from DARIAH end-users, application/service providers and developers on their knowledge and background on e-Infrastructure (e.g. computational and storage resources, user-support services, authentication policies, etc.), on how research data (information) are shared and accessed, about AAI requirements, what services and application researchers are using in their research and what are their characteristics, etc. Based on the inputs, a set of specific A services and application will be developed, such as gUSE/WS-Pgrade workflow oriented gateway, gLibrary framework for distributed information repositories and information retrieval service based on CDSTAR. Concurrently with the application development, a significant working effort is put in the education of DARIAH researchers since many of them have minor or no technical knowledge required to efficiently use various e-Infrastructure resources or new application/services that will be developed during this project. Therefore, a set of training events will be organized to demonstrate the specific applications and services developed within EGI-DARIAH CC, as well as give a general introduction on how to utilize various EGI resources, applications and services.