Explicit semantic enrichment make digital scholarly publications potentially easy to find, to navigate, to organize and to understand. But whereas the generation of explicit semantic information is common in fields like biomedical research, comparable approaches are rare for domains in the humanities. Apart from a lack of authoritative structured knowledge bases formalizing the respective conceptualizations and terminologies, many experts from specialized fields of research seem reluctant to employ the technologies and methods that are currently available for the generation of structured knowledge representations. However, human involvement is indispensable in the organization and application of the domain-specific knowledge representations necessary for the contextualization of structured semantic data extracted from textual and scholarly resources. Over the past decade, various efforts have been made towards openly accessible online knowledge graphs containing collaboratively edited, structured and cross-linked data. Such public knowledge bases might be suitable as a starting point for defining formalized domain knowledge representations, with which the subjects and findings of a research domain can be described. Extensive re-use of the widely adopted shared conceptualizations from a large collaborative knowledge base could be in more than one way beneficial to processes of semantic enrichment, especially those involving domain experts with less-technical backgrounds.
