D3.4: Final Report on Standards and Project Registry
Creators: name: Felicetti, Achille
name: Meghini, Carlo
name: Papatheodorou, Christos
name: Richards, Julian
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2016
Subjects: subject: Archaeology
subject: Getty AAT
subject: Periodo

description: This document is a deliverable (D3.4) of the project ARIADNE - Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe, funded under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme. This document presents a significant update to D3.1 “Initial report on standards and on the registry”. This is a deliverable of ARIADNE WP3, which was mainly concerned with the creation of a registry for integration of information concerning legacy metadata, standard schemas, services and terminological tools pertaining to the archaeological domain. The registry is conceived as an integrated central repository able to describe datasets, to drive resource discovery operations.

This deliverable is comprised of several sections, which detail the structure the data model for the registry (Section 3), an overview of the registry content and mappings (Section 4) and the standards used to create these mappings (Section 5). These standards include the ARIADNE Catalogue Data Model (ACDM), the use of the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) as a single standard for subject for all partners, and participation in the PeriodO project, where partners contributed their temporal terms relative to place. This section is followed by the specific encoding diagrams and schemas describing the structure of the registry and the metadata it holds, along with the templates used by partners to create their mappings (Section 6).

The remaining half of this deliverable (Section 7) details the specific process partners undertook to map their metadata and have it ingested into the ARIADNE portal. Each partner faced different challenges and went through a different process in order to achieve this important step. In several cases this work was seen as an opportunity to introduce standards into their organisation that were not in use before, showing the importance of best practice knowledge transfer within the project. In other instances the sheer size and diversity of data held by a partner was the main challenge. During the process of making their metadata ready for inclusion within the registry, and mapping that metadata to appropriate schemas, etc. partners looked closely at their workflows and in several instances updated their practice.

Out of this joint problem solving, two key innovations emerged. First was how to deal with the myriad subject terms in use across Europe, and the many languages. This required a creative solution to be developed within the project, which resulted in the decision to map all partner subject term lists, in any language to the AAT. By focussing specifically on mapping to concepts rather than terms, and using the knowledge of the domain experts within each of the content-providing partners, subject-based searches across languages are now possible. Second was how to deal with time, as when is always relative to where in archaeology. In an attempt to help solve this issue, collaboration with the US-based PeriodO project was considered to be the best solution, and each partner contributed their period terms to the project, so that they can be incorporated back in to ARIADNE as Linked Data, alongside the rest of the temporal attributions held by the project. Section 7 outlines not only the mapping to the ACDM and the ingestion process carried out by each partner, but their participation in these important initiatives, creating further resources for the archaeological domain.