We can already look back on several years of cooperation with the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial and feel honoured to be able to continue on this path together.
It was also a personal concern of ours to put the system on a sustainable technical basis and thus make an important contribution to the preservation of material relevant to contemporary history and to the work of remembrance.
- UX optimisation of the data structure
- User interface design
- Technical concept & development
- Data migration
- Data structure
The first version of the archive database was created in 2009 using PHP 5 and the Dojo JavaScript toolkit. This was followed in the years 2011 to 2013 by the visitor terminals in the memorial room and the printed version of the "Memorial Book for the Dead of Dachau Concentration Camp" with more than 1,300 pages.
Before the migration, the structure of the large amount of data was analysed and restructured in a close exchange between the customer, concept and development for optimal daily use and research by internal and external persons. The result is a structurally sensible presentation of the personal, material and administrative databases, which enables the users of the portal to link related data with each other and create it in such a way that clean provision, archiving and targeted research and maintenance of the data that is so important to contemporary history can be guaranteed.
First and foremost, the amount of data and how to handle it. This required intensive conceptual work, close coordination on information architecture and data collection. It was a process of categorisation and reorganisation, data migration and the demand for high-performance indexing and searchability. The aim was to develop a new, optimally usable and powerful tool for research, archiving and administration work of all kinds.
The Flow Framework from Neos serves as the technical basis. However, instead of Flow's own domain model architecture, the content repository from the Neos CMS was used as the database, as better performance was expected given the enormous amount of data.
The frontend essentially consists of a Vue app with Vuetify components and Materio templates, which communicates with the data layer via GraphQL. A central aspect of such a system is the high-performance and elaborate search, including filtering and linking options, which was implemented using Elastic Search, while Flow's granular rights management enables precise access control so that both employees of the Dachau Memorial and external persons can work with the system.
