Establishment of a network for the development of a thesaurus of historical medical objects (THIMO)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Fritz Dross
• Subject Area: History of Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 558434321

The aim of the proposed project is to establish a permanently active network of collection managers in the field of medical history and related areas, specialists in vocabulary projects and information science experts as well as those from (collection- and museum-related) computer science. It cooperates with other information science networks and platform operators. The network's task is to develop strategies for the collaborative development of a thesaurus as a research-relevant information infrastructure and to publish it digitally in accordance with FAIR principles together with infrastructure partners. Organizationally, the network is to be developed in 5 workshops over 2 years, incorporating empirical knowledge from existing vocabulary projects and exploring the potential for interdisciplinary synergies. The results of the series of workshops will form the basis for the practical collaborative creation of a Thesaurus of Historical Medical Technology (THIMO) according to FAIR principles, which should comply with ISO standards and be interoperable and translatable in the long term. The workshop results can also be applied to vocabulary projects in other subject specializations. In the future, the Thesaurus of Historical Medical Objects (THIMO) will be permanently maintained and made freely available under an Open Access CC-license. It will be a central tool for improving the quality of collection work within medical history and related collections and museums in order to make their object data accessible for research, including for specialist and cross-disciplinary portals such as the German Digital Library and Europeana. In addition, the vocabulary holdings will be made available as Linked Open Data to digitisation networks such as digiCULT and museum-digital as well as authority file networks and published vocabularies such as GND, Getty AAT, Wikidata and others for reuse. In this way, professionally curated medical-historical object knowledge becomes visible and usable for academic research and culture. Without an interdisciplinary network of experts, the creation of such a thesaurus by a small specialist discipline is not likely to be successful. While the expertise of museums and collections lies in the definition of terms, support is needed in structuring the vocabulary according to ISO standards, in editorial maintenance and additions, and in making it openly accessible in the long term. The specific aim of the application is therefore to establish a network that acts as the basis for a professionally implemented thesaurus project.

• DFG Programme: Cooperation and Networking (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigators: Eva Fuhry; Beate Kunst; Privatdozent Dr. Stefan Schulz