Kepa works for the Research and Development Department of the Göttingen State and University Library, Germany. In the lab, he is active for EHRI and works on the creation of the online portal and research environment.

I graduated with a Doctorate at the Centre for Mind and Brain Sciences (CiMEC) at the University of Trento (Italy) with a focus in Computational Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics.

e-Infrastructure innovator

After a short time as a post-doctoral researcher I joined EHRI at the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB), one of the largest scientific university libraries and one of the leading e-Infrastructure innovators in Germany. The SUB participates in numerous national and international activities in the context of digital preservation, research data management, virtual research environments and open access.

At the EHRI project I am involved in both technical work packages that build the Data Integration Infrastructure and the EHRI Portal and Virtual Research Environment.

Integrated help desk

When I started at EHRI, my initial task consisted of getting an overview of technologies used in the fields of data integration, portals and virtual research environments. After that I was involved in the conception, planning and implementation of services in the portal, such as the authentication service and an integrated help desk.

Language technologies

One of my main fields of interest is the use of linguistic knowledge and language technologies for areas like search, information retrieval and integration of data. In this area I have developed statistical language models used for language identification and machine translation of collection descriptions. Those models will be used to build one of the central services of the portal, an application based on information retrieval methods. This application allows users of the EHRI portal to locate the collection holding institutions that are most likely to help them in their research.

Multilingual search

I also work on the multilingual search, involving search engine technologies and the use of multilingual controlled vocabularies. Both the content of the portal and the users will come from different countries, using different languages.

Interdisciplinary character

One of the aspects I enjoy most about working in EHRI is the interdisciplinary character of the project, where people from different areas like information sciences, history and computer sciences work together towards a common goal.

Read Kepa’s Dig.Log, where he writes more about the help desk system for EHRI’s online portal.