Projects of the IRDT —
The IRDT both participates in and advances interdisciplinary research on digitization. Here we present excerpts of our current projects. You will also find publications on the law of digitization.
- INWEND - Intelligent knowledge-based decision support
- Mining and Modeling Text. Interdisciplinary applications, informatics development, legal perspectives (MiMoText)
- Digital Studies and Research
INWEND
The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has led to some legal uncertainty. Many companies, associations, and other institutions have sought legal advice on how to correctly implement the new law. Many citizens are also affected by the GDPR’s provisions, often without knowing it. Practically everybody incessantly deals with the personal data of others, and can thus quickly become an addressee of the provisions of the GDPR. However, for someone who blogs privately, shares photos on social media, or runs a fan page, it is far more difficult to understand and correctly apply these data protection regulations.
This may initially lead to an implementation deficit of data protection law; that is to say that entities may not (fully) comply with legal data protection requirements and specifications. Conversely, there is a risk that legal requirements will deter people from implementing desirable projects, even though they could have been implemented in conformity with data protection. Both consequences are unsatisfactory.
The INWEND project is an interdisciplinary research project in which business information scientists and lawyers from the University of Trier collaborate to develop software that can make legal recommendations in a sub-area of data protection law. The use of artificial intelligence is intended to help non-lawyers more easily comply with legal requirements on the one hand, while making use of the legal leeway provided by law.
Within the scope of the project, researchers will develop a prototypical knowledge-based system that guides users through the legal review of his or her choosing. As a pilot project, INWEND also aims to clarify the extent to which informatics methods can be used for legal applications, thus laying the foundation for future interdisciplinary research in this area.
From the Institute, Prof. Dr. Raue and Mr. Sebastian Schriml are involved in the project..
Mining and Modeling Text
Digitization has made extensive text and data resources increasingly available. The IRDT group is rising to address the challenge of efficiently incorporating these digitized resources in the humanities. To maximize benefit the benefit of digitization and efficiently use these resources, the academic community requires innovative processes that permit automatic information extraction, and promote the subsequent generation of knowledge.
Against this background, the MiMoText project deals with the automatic extraction, structuring and networking of specialist information from text and data collections, as well as the use of such information networks to answer questions in the humanities. The first application of this project is in the context of the history of German and French literature, but the transferability of the methods to other disciplines has been intended from the project’s outset. MiMoText takes into account different types of texts, from lightly structured texts (e.g. bibliographical indexes) to non-fiction texts in the humanities (e.g. literature history) to literary texts (e.g. novels).
The project’s central goal is to develop interdisciplinary solutions that combine conceptual, humanities-focused, informatics, legal and infrastructural questions and procedures.
The IRDT contributes its legal expertise to the project. The Institute's partners in the project include Prof. Dr. Raue, Prof. Dr. von Ungern-Sternberg and Ms. Katharina Erler.
