WHAT DO WE DO
Supporting FAIR Digital Research Products in the Humanities
The ATLAS guidelines provide practical advice for Digital Humanities scholars on implementing FAIR principles when producing research outputs. They’re also valuable for scholars new to DH who want to explore the field’s distinctive research products and standards.
Based on the recommendations of the ALLEA E-Humanities Working Group, “Sustainable and FAIR Data Sharing in the Humanities”, these guidelines provide specific recommendations for five common digital humanities (DH) outputs: digital scholarly editions, text collections, software tools, ontologies and linked open data. Organised around the phases of digital object creation, from identification to dissemination, the guidelines help scholars to create research products that are both FAIR-compliant and valuable to the broader research community.
The ATLAS guidelines were developed within the PRIN 2022 ATLAS project, a collaboration between the University of Bologna, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and the Italian National Research Council (CNR) Unit of Pisa (comprising the Institute for Computational Linguistics ‘A. Zampolli’—ILC—and the Institute of Information Science and Technologies ‘Alessandro Faedo’—ISTI).
The first step in creating FAIR research products is to identify your own research data, the relevant community standards and best practices, and any existing useful resources, such as tools and datasets.
The next step is planning. If you keep the FAIR principles in mind and are clear about your research goals from the outset, you will have a better understanding of what to consider at every stage, from data collection to publication and maintenance.
The choices made at the third stage are crucial for ensuring the FAIRness of the data. It is important to consider all the options relating to data formats and metadata standards, and to document your research workflow.
Once the research product is ready, it is important to know how to guarantee long-term access to it, as well as how to provide the necessary metadata and information for its proper use.
The final step focuses on how to help your target audience (re-)use and engage with your research product.
WHAT DO WE FOCUS ON
Exploring Practices Across Research Products
General Recommendations
Digital Scholarly Editions
Text Collections
Linked Open Data
Ontologies
Software
General Recommendations
These cross-cutting recommendations focus on practical steps that make any research product easier to find, cite, and use. They propose creating a clear landing page with access points, licence, version, and status; offering full credits and citation guidance with persistent identifiers; documenting design, tools, and methods with maintainable, multi-format documentation; and providing English metadata to reach wider audiences. The guidance emphasizes low-cost, sustainable publishing options and points to readily available platforms and tool directories so that teams can keep information current without building bespoke sites. The result is research outputs that are discoverable, citable, and usable beyond their original context, increasing impact and long-term value across disciplines.
Digital Scholarly Editions
This guide outlines how to plan an editorial workflow and select interoperable, standards-based tools; include document images via IIIF; enrich texts semantically by linking entities to authoritative LOD sources; encode texts and metadata with TEI and related domain schemas; customize and publish machine-readable schemas; document textual tradition, methodology, and editorial choices; give transparent credit to editors and technical contributors; version the edition and its by-products for citability and trust; facilitate reuse by offering downloads in open, standard formats (and accessible PDFs where relevant); ensure long-term preservation and discoverability through trusted repositories and field-specific catalogues; and adopt sustainable visualization and low-overhead publishing solutions with indexing and search for extensive texts.
Text Collections
These recommendations provide a practical roadmap for designing, documenting, and disseminating FAIR-aligned digital text collections. The guidance prioritizes interoperable, standards-based formats (plain text with structured metadata, XML/TEI and related schemas), rigorous source citation with links to authoritative catalogues, and authority control for authors and works via persistent identifiers and LOD services. It outlines how to state editorial and collection criteria, adopt IIIF for facsimiles, assign per-text PIDs, and maintain transparent versioning, status, and roadmaps. Finally, it highlights user-facing access through search, indexes, and thematic sub-collections, drawing on established frameworks such as NISO, OAIS, and RIDE to ensure preservation, discoverability, and reuse across disciplines.
Linked Open Data
These recommendations provide a practical framework for creating, publishing, and sustaining FAIR-aligned Linked Open Datasets (LODs) in the humanities and cultural heritage. The guidance prioritizes reuse of existing models, vocabularies, and tools; formalizing collection-specific data models as ontologies when needed; and rich interlinking with external authority records to maximize interoperability and context. It emphasizes explicit provenance (e.g., PROV), stable URI patterns, multi-format publication in trusted repositories, and registration in LOD-specific catalogs. Finally, it promotes both expert and broad public access through SPARQL endpoints with worked examples and user-friendly interfaces. Together, these practices yield datasets that are discoverable, well-documented, interoperable, preservable, and reusable across platforms and disciplines.
Ontologies
These recommendations outline a practical pathway for designing, publishing, and sustaining FAIR-aligned ontologies for the humanities and cultural heritage. They emphasize reuse of established models and vocabularies, participatory design, and adherence to proven methodologies and design patterns. The guidance surveys W3C standards for representation and access (RDF, OWL, Turtle, JSON-LD, SKOS, SPARQL), highlights tools and workflows for implementation and documentation, and promotes interoperability via explicit mappings and crosswalk standards. It also addresses long-term stewardship through persistent, stable URIs, publication in robust services and repositories, and regular link maintenance. Together, these practices support ontologies that are interoperable, well-documented, preservable, and readily reusable across projects and platforms.
Software
These recommendations support the design, release, and long‑term stewardship of FAIR research software in Digital Humanities. The guidance prioritizes reuse of existing solutions before new development, community‑informed design using proven software engineering practices, and robust integration strategies based on standard interfaces and data formats. It encourages the use of open, widely supported technologies, collaborative open‑source workflows with clear contribution, branching, and versioning models, and comprehensive, user‑oriented documentation. For dissemination and credit, it recommends official releases with licences, changelogs, and deposition in trusted repositories with rich metadata, complemented by preservation via Software Heritage and alignment with FAIR4RS and RSMD. The result is software that is discoverable, interoperable, citable, maintainable, and reusable across projects and time.