DH communities form at various institutional, regional, cultural, linguistic, and subject-specific levels, as well as through various types of academic events in which scholars participate. This submission examines how various DH communities are linked through an analysis of the speakers at annual conferences of the German-speaking countries (DHd conferences), on the one hand, and speakers in DH lecture series in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, which took place between 2016 and 2025. The analysis is based on existing data sets of the conferences and, in addition, on newly collected data on the lecture series. It turns out that the conferences are characterized by a higher number of multiple authors, whereas lecture series are dominated by individual speakers. Regarding the linkage between both groups, only 11 % of those participating in the conferences also gave lectures in the lecture series; conversely, 40 % of the lecture series speakers were also actively involved in the conferences. A calculated ‘linkage score’ shows that, on average, those scholars that present at both types of events are more concentrated at conferences. Overall, the combined evaluation of both types of DH events and their speakers provides new insights into the structure of the DH field. It can be assumed that lecture series, in particular, play an important role as bridging elements between DH as its own discipline and various humanities communities beyond that.

This paper argues that interoperability in European cultural data infrastructures is not primarily a semantic modelling problem but a governance and rights-design challenge. While digital humanities scholarship has focused extensively on ontologies, linked open data, and technical interoperability, less attention has been paid to the legal, organisational, and curatorial architectures required to sustain such systems at continental scale. Heritage Digital Twins (HDTs), central to the emerging European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), make these structural tensions particularly visible.

Drawing on the implementation of the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space (DSS) within the ECHOES framework, the paper extends earlier ontological pattern–based methodology into governance-aware digital twin deployment. Rather than proposing a new ontology, we operationalise and stress-test the Heritage Digital Twin Ontology (HDTO) in small-scale, multilingual heritage ecosystems dispersed across multiple national jurisdictions. In this environment, shallow archival depth, historically layered translations, dispersed custodianship, and uneven documentation practices shift the core challenge from schema alignment to authority reconciliation, rights clarification, and publication-boundary modelling.

Musical recordings, audiovisual materials, and ethnographic artefacts in these contexts involve layered authors’ rights, neighbouring rights, moral rights, personality rights, and, in some cases, Indigenous (CARE) considerations. We demonstrate that these rights layers must be encoded as structural components of digital twin models rather than treated as external compliance constraints.

Aligned with the European Interoperability Framework, we propose a governance-first architectural pattern integrating legal, organisational, semantic, and technical layers. The findings suggest that digital twin implementation can function as an interoperability catalyst: by formalising governance constraints, semantic alignment becomes operationally tractable. The paper contributes a framework for legally robust, sustainable, and AI-ready cultural data infrastructures that enables small and multilingual heritage ecosystems to participate in European data spaces without centralising control or erasing community agency.

The growing diversity of Digital Humanities (DH) infrastructures and research practices increases the need for shared conceptual frameworks that enable interoperability and sustainable knowledge exchange across institutions and national contexts. This paper focuses on current efforts to further develop and implement the Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities (TaDiRAH) as a common vocabulary for describing digital research workflows.

Recent integrations of TaDiRAH within the German data competence centers HERMES and SODa demonstrate its practical value for structuring services such as resource and expertise databases, hubs, and community platforms. These implementations also served as a catalyst for critically reassessing the taxonomy itself. Practical use revealed ambiguities, missing concepts, and structural inconsistencies, leading to renewed community discussion on revision and governance.

A workshop held in May 2025 initiated concrete steps toward improving the taxonomy, including proposals for clearer hierarchical notation, alignment of definitions with external authority data, expansion of explanatory examples, and improvements to the public GitHub workflow to support community contributions. A new working group has since been established to coordinate sustainable revision processes, versioning practices, and multilingual updates, including revisions of existing translations and preparation of new language versions.

The paper discusses how these current activities aim to strengthen TaDiRAH as a community-driven infrastructure component supporting FAIR-aligned documentation and interoperability across DH projects. It also addresses challenges arising from overlapping research activities and differing disciplinary interpretations, arguing for a balance between conceptual precision and practical usability.

By presenting ongoing development efforts and inviting broader community participation, the contribution positions TaDiRAH as an evolving framework that connects local practices with international infrastructures and supports the continued growth of a collaborative, interoperable DH landscape.