Piergiovanna Grossi

An Interoperable Spatio-Temporal Model for Archaeological Data Based on ISO Standard 19100

Archaeological data are characterized by both spatial and temporal dimensions that are often related to each other and are of particular interest during the interpretation process. For this reason, several attempts have been performed in recent years to develop a geographical information system (GIS) tailored for archaeological data. However, despite the increasing use of information technologies in the archaeological domain, the actual situation is that any agency or research group independently develops its own local database and management application that is isolated from the others. Conversely, the sharing of information and the cooperation between different archaeological agencies or research groups can be particularly useful to support the interpretation process by using data discovered in similar situations with respect to spatio-temporal or thematic aspects. In the geographical domain, the INSPIRE initiative of the European Union tries to support the development of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) through which several organizations, such as public bodies or private companies, with overlapping goals can share data, resources, tools, and competencies in an effective way. The aim of this article is to lay the basis for the development of an archaeological SDI starting from the experience acquired during the collaboration among several Italian organizations. In particular, the article proposes a spatio-temporal conceptual model for archaeological data based on the ISO Standards of the 19100 family and promotes the use of the GeoUML methodology to put into practice such interoperability. The GeoUML methodology and tools have been enhanced to suit the archaeological domain and to automatically produce several useful documents, configuration files, and code base starting from the conceptual specification. The applicability of the spatio-temporal conceptual model and the usefulness of the produced tools have been tested in three different Italian contexts: Rome, Verona, and Isola della Scala.

Towards the extraction of semantics from incomplete archaeological records

The Archaeological Geographical Information System of Verona (SITAVR) has been developed since 2011, starting from an existing and well-consolidated system, the Archaeological Geographical Information System of Rome (SITAR). The main objective of both projects is collecting information about the archaeological findings regarding the two Italian urban centres with the aim to support a complete archaeological analysis and allow for easy data reuse and dissemination. Data collected in both projects come not only from current excavation campaigns, but they have also been extracted from very old documents describing excavations performed during the 18th century. In this last case, many details about the location and the time of existence of findings are not known. The SITAVR project has lead to the definition of a domain model for archaeological data, called \(\mathscr {S}tar\), and now it is focused on the mapping between this model and other international standards, such as the CIDOC CRM (2016) and its extension CIDOC-CRM\(_{\textit{archeo}}\) (Felicetti et al. 2016). This paper presents a general approach for guiding the mapping of a dataset regarding ancient archaeological data towards CIDOC-CRM\(_{\textit{archeo}}\), especially for what concerns to spatial and temporal properties that are only partially specified.