Information Processes in the Social Sciences

An aim of information science research and development at GESIS is to support the integration of research, service, and consultation – the central leitmotif of the GESIS program – in all aspects of computer science and information technology.

Specific research and development activities include the creation of a joint portal, which serves to bring together and integrate the range of services GESIS provides, while simultaneously remaining open and accessible to the services of external providers and for integration into existing infrastructures dedicated to the supra-regional provision of social science information. To this end, we focus on:

Support information and knowledge processing,
Support knowledge transfer,
Product and service-oriented research.

The first results of the integration of the GESIS products and those of its cooperation partners are available through the social science portal sowiport, which will be continually extended and improved in the years to come. Alongside research on the treatment of semantic heterogeneity (semantic integration of variably indexed databases and library catalogues) and on the configuration of user interfaces, a key role was played by the creation of efficient infrastructures for data retrieval based on XML databases and search engine technology, as well as by the cross-linking with the scientific information portal vascoda.de and the secondary use of the results for the development of information portals of other research associations and providers of specialist information.

Current fields of activity include the integration of social science data by means of reference details on literature, research projects and research institutions (text-fact integration), electronic scholarly publishing (publishing tools, new forms of publication, open access), the cross-linking of national and international research information in so-called Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), as well as evaluation projects on software ergonomics, information retrieval, and scientometry.

To the section information science research and development

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