Achille Felicetti

CRMba a CRM extension for the documentation of standing buildings

Exploring the connections between successive phases and overlapping layers from different ages in an ancient building is paramount for its understanding and study. Archaeologists and cultural heritage experts are always eager to unveil the hidden relations of an archaeological building to reconstruct its history and for its interpretation. This paper presents CRMba, a CIDOC CRM extension developed to facilitate the discovery and the interpretation of archaeological resources through the definition of new concepts required to describe the complexity of historic buildings. The CRMba contributes to solving the datasets interoperability issue by exploiting the use of the CIDOC CRM to overcome data fragmentation, to investigate the semantics of building components, of functional spaces and of the construction phases of historic buildings and complexes, making explicit their physical and topological relations through time and space. The approach used for the development of the CRMba makes the model valid for the documentation of different kinds of buildings, across periods, styles and conservation state.

Open source and open standards for using integrated geographic data on the web

This article describes the first results of our research concerning the developement of a complete Open Source system based on W3C and ISO 19100 standards to integrate and manage spatial and non-spatial archaeological information on the Web. The system is based on MAD, a web tool originally developed to manage archaeological semantic datasets encoded in RDF using the CIDOC-CRM ontology. Geographic functions have been implemented to integrate spatial archaeological information for the management of unstructured documents, such as excavation diaries and reports, in a spatial context. The system will allow the creation and distribution of rich geospatial relationships across the Web and the use of geographic data in a Semantic Web scenario. The Geographic Markup Language (GML) has been used in our system to store geographic data related to archaeological records. GML information has been created using Open Source GIS software starting from vectorial data (.shp or .dxf). Brand new GML documents can be also created starting from non-spatial data. The advanced query system in MAD allows the creation of Semantic Web enriched data combining spatial and non-spatial information and using ontologies. Data serialized by the MAD system can be exported in SVG or visualized using map server web applications. The flexibility of GML features will also allow the implementation of complex query-on-map functions to visually query and generate dynamic maps. The tool can be also used to host and serialize KML archaeological files to be used in Google Earth and Google Maps applications

Interoperability Knowledge Base for Persistent Identifiers Interoperability Framework

In this paper, we propose a semantic web based solution to implement the Interoperability Framework (IF) for Persistent Identifiers (PI) developed within the context of APARSEN EU project. The IF provides a comprehensive, semantics-aware solution for interoperability of heterogeneous Persistent Identifier systems. Such a solution aims to provide added-value services built on an Interoperability Knowledge Base. The IF ontology refinement and the related prototype specifics have been designed adopting a bottom-up approach that starts from a) the analysis of metadata provided by Content Providers and b) the collection of functional and semantic requirements of Persistent Identifier Domains (PID to fostering ontology-based metadata translation among different bodies. Conclusions and intended future work close the paper.

Managing full-text excavation data with semantic tools

The paper deals with the management of archaeological data from excavations that cannot be easily processed using traditional forms and relational databases. It proposes a way of preserving the integrity of original information, including spatial relations. It demonstrates that also in this case CIDOC-CRM offers a valid schema that may be easily extended to incorporate geographic elements and relations. The system proposed is applied to a case-study concerning a Bronze Age 10 year-long excavation in Cyprus.

ARIADNE: A Research Infrastructure for Archaeology

Research e-infrastructures, digital archives, and data services have become important pillars of scientific enterprise that in recent decades have become ever more collaborative, distributed, and data intensive. The archaeological research community has been an early adopter of digital tools for data acquisition, organization, analysis, and presentation of research results of individual projects. However, the provision of e-infrastructure and services for data sharing, discovery, access, and (re)use have lagged behind. This situation is being addressed by ARIADNE, the Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe. This EU-funded network has developed an e-infrastructure that enables data providers to register and provide access to their resources (datasets, collections) through the ARIADNE data portal, facilitating discovery, access, and other services across the integrated resources. This article describes the current landscape of data repositories and services for archaeologists in Europe, and the issues that make interoperability between them difficult to realize. The results of the ARIADNE surveys on users’ expectations and requirements are also presented. The main section of the article describes the architecture of the e-infrastructure, core services (data registration, discovery, and access), and various other extant or experimental services. The ongoing evaluation of the data integration and services is also discussed. Finally, the article summarizes lessons learned and outlines the prospects for the wider engagement of the archaeological research community in the sharing of data through ARIADNE.

Semantic enrichment of geographic data and 3D models for the management of archaeological features

The present paper describes various technologies to link semantic information to 3D models during the process of management of 3D data and geometries used by the archaeologists for the reconstruction of ancient monuments or sites. This is an important requirement for the purposes of modern research since, although we have a lot of good 3D models of topographic objects, it is often difficult to make computers aware of the nature of the related real object (buildings, sites or landscapes) or parts of them (e.g. a column capitel and its various elements). The same difficulties occur when it is necessary to link geographic information to 3D models or to deal with metadata and annotations concerning the same elements, for which semantic technologies are required. We propose a possible way to integrate 3D data in a geographic environment and in addition to enrich 3D models by providing a set of semantic descriptions for each geometrical component of a given object, extended with semantic annotations of the model as a whole or of specific parts of it. The proposed technology is based on the use of various standards, including GML and one of its application schema, CityGML, specifically designed for the representation of 3D urban objects, and CIDOC-CRM, the cultural heritage ontology suitable for every non-structural description of each topograhic object or building, including temporal entities (events).

CIDOC-CRM spider: stonehenge as an example of semantic data integration

Since archaeology in particular and humanities in general are interdisciplinary disciplines, there is an imperious need to enhance the accessibility and harmonise data integration, given their varied resource types (books, archives, scientific data, GIS, 3D models etc) and their different conceptual and technological structures and standards. A factor that further reduces accessibility and query performances is related to storing, such as physical location of data, language, and interface. The advent of Semantic Web technology represents an important advance in creating networks of archaeological knowledge based on various resources available on-line. While the valuable use of CIDOC-CRM (Comite International pour la Documentation -Conceptual Reference Model) ontology for specific CH (Cultural Heritage) domains (e.g. museums, libraries, etc) has been partially demonstrated, the interdisciplinary implementations are limited. In this article, we explore the potential of the CIDOC-CRM for a cross-domain implementation of CH data integration. We conducted tha mappings of different on-line resources related to Stonehenge to CIDOC-CRM, and evaluated them in the MAD database, a web-based application that manages natively XML-based datasets. The result ensures the validity of mapping mechanism and the semantic integration of CH data from different sources.

Validating the Digital Documentation of Cultural Objects

The paper deals with the problem of validating digital documentation of cultural heritage. The trustworthiness of digital replicas of cultural objects relies on the presence of paradata, i.e. data concerning the provenance of the digital document. Several cases are considered, suggesting solutions to support the digital documentation, either born digital through automatic data acquisition or resulting from post-processing of captured data. Also interpretive digital models are considered and a tool for annotating digital objects is presented.

A Repository for Heterogeneous and Complex Digital Cultural Objects

The paper proposes a solution for a repository of digital cultural objects, which can manage complex data as 3D objects, videos and more, together with the related metadata. The repository is built with open source components and may be easily installed and managed. Basing on an example, interfaces are shown for the most common operations. The system allows for text searches, semantic searches as well as facet refinements. The proposed system can support a full-featured digital library for its modularity and easy personalization.

Semantic web, digital libraries and the future of cultural Heritage

This paper provides an overview regarding the application of the Semantic Web oriented technologies we have developed as part of the EPOCH and AMA projects for Cultural Heritage Digital Libraries. We wanted to enhance interoperability among diverse archives and to make disperse digital information available through the web in a standard format. Our toolset includes an application for mapping existing archive schemas to ontology schemas (AMA Mapping Tool), a tool to recursively markup unstructured text documents (AMA Text Tool) and a Semantic Web Database able to store, query and return simple and complex semantic information (MAD). We used the CIDOC-CRM core ontology to define the entities we dealt with and to describe concepts and relations among them.