MIGRATING INFORMATION FROM IRANIAN EXCAVATION REPORTS
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 13/10/2020

The existing knowledge in the field of archaeology is generated in some Iranian cultural heritage institutions. The knowledge generated in an archaeological exploration is not integrated with knowledge generated in other archaeological explorations, and therefore, a large part of the valuable experience and knowledge in this field remains unused, which may lead to the loss of national historic heritage. Excavation reports comprise one of the most important types of archaeological publications. In Iran, they are mostly published as grey literature. Based on previous works starting in the 1990’s we are exploring two methodologies for extracting information from excavation reports written in English. The first method is manually encoding the reports into XML documents and then extracting information from the encoded reports. The second method is automatically extracting information directly from the reports. The basis for both methods is that various types of elements that are seen as valuable for future use of information about excavation, based on local experience and international standards. These two methods not only lead to variant levels of reproducibility, but also result in unequal levels of human resources investment. We will also show how texts structured using these two methods can be imported into CIDOC CRM compatible databases. The first method has already been conducted and hopefully we will get results from the second method by submitting the time of final paper conference presentation.

Author(s): Eide, Øyvind (Digital Humanities - Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Informationsverarbeitung, Universität zu Köln) - Niknia, Massoomeh (Kharazmi University, Tehran; University of Cologne)