DAICA - Digital Assistant Investigating Cultural Assets Lothar Hotz 1 , Dan Cristea 2 , Justyna Pietrzak 3 , Martin Povazay 4 , Brigitte Rauter 4 , and Daniela Buleandra 5 1 HITeC e.V. c/o University of Hamburg, Germany, hotz@informatik.uni-hamburg.de 2 University Alexandru Ioan Cuza and Romanian Academy, Romania, dcristea@info.uaic.ro 3 Eleka Ingeniaritza Linguistikoa S.L., Spain, justyna@eleka.net 4 P.Solutions Informationstechnologien GmbH, Austria, {martin.povazay,brigitte.rauter}@psolutions.at 5 SIVECO Romania SA, Romania, Daniela.Buleandra@siveco.ro Abstract. Besides web pages, the web offers access to an immense va- riety of digitized source material, inventories and catalogues hosted by libraries and archives relevant for humanities and social sciences (HSS) studies. In practice, a remote access to HSS information is consider- ably hampered by several barriers: Researchers interested in a specific topic do not know which institution harbors information related to a specific topic; Data collections are equipped with unique user interfaces and offer different data structures; Language barriers impede informa- tion exploitation; Retrieval mechanisms do not provide intelligent access to semantically related information. In this paper, we describe an Dig- ital Assistant Investigating Cultural Assets (DAICA) for research and information procurement in HSS, guided by the vision of a digital in- formation space of cultures. The DAICA will support HSS studies by autonomously identifying appropriate resources and presenting topical investigation results. In particular, the DAICA will integrate technol- ogy and provide a solution for analysing historical digitized documents, performing semantical search in deep data structures, automatic transla- tion, extending a search by meaningful relations, creating summaries of identified resources, and providing user interactions for complex search results. Keywords: Semantic search, machine translation, summarization, op- tical character recognition, cultural heritage 1 Introduction The web offers an immense variety of digital or digitized source material, in- ventories and catalogues relevant for studies in humanities and social sciences (HSS). Institutions such as libraries, museums, archives, local and regional au- thorities, parliamentary and media documentation services provide a wealth of