Developing Crosslingual Ontologies in WissKI: Transcontinental Research Collaboration in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence

Abstract

Since July 2019 the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth has been funding a project dedicated to the creation of an Islamic Cultural Archive (ICA), a database designed for collaborative research in English, French and Arabic connecting researchers based in Germany and four African countries. The ICA pursues individual but interconnected studies revolving around Islamic learning in Africa. With the support of IT specialists, the project team developed a platform that allows us to handle our data through an ontology-based digital research environment building on WissKI, a set of modules that combines the Drupal content management system with semantic web technology. This article discusses the technical implications of our endeavour to connect diverse languages and data from various digital and digitized media. The research team members link their datasets to create synergies between various research foci and interests, ranging from the nexus of Islamic knowledge production, dissemination and acquisition to the socio-religious, political-economic, and cultural dimensions of Islamic learning. The article shows how our platform allows us to collect and archive different types of data, generate metadata through a shared ontology, and connect data beyond language barriers. Most notably, our data description method links the data through multilayered and multilingual tags, as well as through comprehensive cross-references, thus constituting an innovative way of data handling that can benefit researchers in Islamic Studies as well as cultural and literary studies more broadly.