Integrating data for archaeology
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-01-04

Correction: The presenter is Costis Dallas.

In the past years, infrastructure projects in the Archaeology domain have focused on data aggregation in order to bring to the end users the vast amount of information gathered from various organizations and stakeholders. The typical processes found in a data aggregation infrastructure include: ingestion, normalization, transformation and validation processes that mainly focus on the homogenization and cleaning of heterogenous data. A portal is usually employed to present this information to the end users and is met with limited success due to the vast information contained. In order to increase the quality of services that are provided to end users, the European funded project Ariadne (http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/) aims at integrating this data by modelling the underlying domain and providing the technical framework for automatic integration of heterogeneous resources.
The heart of the infrastructure lies in the underlying domain model: Ariadne Catalog Data Model (ACDM), a DCAT derived model which models a large number of entities such as Agents, Language resources, datasets, collections, reports, services, databases, etc. With the help of a of micro-service oriented architecture and a set of powerful enrichment micro-services all aggregated data are transformed into XML and RDF, annotated over subject, space and time with the help of AAT, Geonames and Perio.do thesauri (thus establishing a common reference) and interlinked with each other based on their structural or logical relationiships. The data integration services can mine for links among resources, link them together and against language resources such as vocabularies. Complex records can be split into their individual components, represented, enriched and stored separately while maintaining their identity using semantic linking. Each integrated resource is assigned a URI and published to:

a) Virtuoso RDF Store in RDF which provides a SPARQL interface
b) to Elastic Search in JSON which provides a powerful indexing mechanism that can help present and associate resources
accurately in real-time.
This approach can provide developers and creative industries with the means to create innovative applications and mine
information form the RDF store. End users ranging from simple visitors to domain researchers can access this data through the infrastructure’s portal which is capable of hiding the complexity of this plethora of data, filter the results using a plethora of filters and present connected resources in a way that can help guide the user instead of confusing him/her.
The technical infrastructure has been developed using various programming languages such as Java, PHP, Javascript, it is distributed spanning multiple virtual machines and brings together different established technologies and components. Both the technical infrastructure and the portal will be presented and demonstrated.

Author - Dr. Gavrilis, Dimitris, Athena Research Center, Maroussi, Greece (Presenting author)

Co-author(s) - Fihn, Johan, Swedish National Data Service, Gothenburg, Sweden
Co-author(s) - Olsson, Olof, Swedish National Data Service, Gothenburg, Sweden
Co-author(s) - Afiontzi, Eleni, Athena Research Center, Maroussi, Greece
Co-author(s) - Felicetti, Achille, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
Co-author(s) - Niccolucci, Franco, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
Co-author(s) - Cuy, Sebastian, German Archaeological Institute, Berlin, Germany