Subproject 4: repository
Eric Decker: Open Access Repository Global History of Insurance Online (GHIO)
GHIO serves as a collaborative platform of this project. It offers tools for collaborative research activities and an online platform for disseminating the project’s results, by means of a website, both to academic and professional, non-academic audiences.
GHIO is likewise designed as an open access repository of long-term international statistics on insurance, directed at the research community interested in the history of insurance. The repository unifies, for the first time, statistical data from a wide range of publications and unpublished sources. The data will be published open access and in an open format usable for spreadsheet programmes and other data-base systems.
The platform aims to offer several functionalities, as a secure common point of access to sources for project members; the development of annotation-based data extraction workflows to catalogue and transform statistical data from tables and infographics; the construction of a digital collection comprising source material plus annotation-derived entity and transcription assets that can be linked to page impressions and searched; the creation of an open information resource that shares relevant data with the community using OAI formats.
The repository collects aggregate data that are genuinely international, either in a comparative or in a globally generalising sense. These data also include statistics for the regions and nations examined in Subprojects 2, 3, and 4 – this data will be made accessible for the other subprojects as early as possible. The repository also integrates statistics and other relevant sources that are collected in the thematic subprojects (2, 3, 4) and delivered to subproject 1.