The amount of research data in the Humanities is increasing at fast speed. Metadata helps describing and making accessible this data to interested researchers within and across institutions. While metadata interoperability is an issue that is being recognised and addressed, the systematic and user-driven provision of annotations and the linking together of resources into new organisational layers have received much less attention. This paper gives an overview of our evolving technological eScience environment to support such functionality. It describes two tools, ADDIT and ViCoS, which enable researchers, rather than archive managers, to organise and reorganise research data to fit their particular needs. The two tools, which are embedded into our institute's existing software landscape, are an initial step towards an eScience environment that gives our scientists easy access to (multimodal) research data of their interest, and empowers them to structure, enrich, link together, and share such data as they wish.

The emerging area of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has proven to add an interesting dimension to many research projects. Within the language-sites initiative we have brought together a broad range of links to digital language corpora and resources. Via Google Earth’s visually appealing 3D-interface users can spin the globe, zoom into an area they are interested in and access directly the relevant language resources. This paper focuses on several ways of relating the map and the online data (lexica, annotations, multimedia recordings, etc.). Furthermore, we discuss some of the implementation choices that have been made, including future challenges. In addition, we show how scholars (both linguists and anthropologists) are using GIS tools to fulfill their specific research needs by making use of practical examples. This illustrates how both scientists and the general public can benefit from geography-based access to digital language data.

In this paper, we describe a unifying approach to tackle data heterogeneity issues for lexica and related resources. We present LEXUS, our software that implements the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) to uniformly describe and manage lexica of different structures. LEXUS also makes use of a central Data Category Registry (DCR) to address terminological issues with regard to linguistic concepts as well as the handling of working and object languages. Finally, we report on ViCoS, a LEXUS extension, providing support for the definition of arbitrary semantic relations between lexical entries or parts thereof.