TGE Adonis Integrated Access to Digital Data and Documents

in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Like other major European countries, France has set in place a high level strategy for large scale research, and is constructing a research infrastructure to support it. The TGE ADONIS is the part of that strategy dedicated to the Social Sciences and Humanities.

Origin and motivation of the project

The contribution of ADONIS to the  National Research Strategy has several aspects. A major concern is the need to archive and to promote integrated access to digital data and documents in the humanities and Social Sciences ; this is regarded as of national strategic importance, given the high level of French investment in this domain. Such activities are also a major component of the European Research Infrastructure "roadmap", and the TGE thus represents French participation in that strategy at the international as well as national levels.

Co-ordination of a coherent archiving and access service for research datasets in the Humanities and Social Sciences is something which cannot easily be done at the level of individual institutions or laboratories. The TGE thus has a major role in promoting the sharing of expertise amongst laboratories, in encouraging the definition and adoption of best practice in such areas, and in co-ordinating the provision of relevant technical services. It should be emphasized that ADONIS itself is a facilitator and not a funder of projects

Features and technology

The main activities of Adonis are:

• Provision of the ADONIS Grid: a national service infrastructure providing massive storage, networking, and long-term archival facilities.
• Development and deployment of the ISIDORE platform: a state of the art intelligent query engine, using advanced techniques to permit semantic searching of the "deep web".
• Promotion of interoperability amongst resources by means of Guides to Good Practice,  training, and other facilities.

For more English language information:

• on the project as a whole [1]
• on the ADONIS Grid [2]
• on ISIDORE [3]
• on the long term archiving [4]
• on the best practises [5]