Living Sources

Living Sources is the research data portal of the Digital Editions group in the Max Planck Digital Library.

The guiding principles of this data publication effort are

• embracing the web as publication medium,
• pragmatism (as outlined in this presentation [in german]),
• post-hoc integration via linked data.

The idea of Living Sources has grown out of two experiences

• publishing online journals in the Living Reviews family and
• The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS).

WALS gave us the opportunity to apply our know-how in online publishing to research data rather than conventional publications. But it also raised the question of how to embed data firmly in the web. This is where linked data comes in. It offers a unified access protocol to data published under Living Sources and an integration mechanism for distributed resources.

This portal will serve as central entry point to the data publications, as channel to announce new publications and as hub to collect recipes on how to work with the data.