CAA2016

A Catalog for Archaelogical Resources

Franca Debole, Nicola Aloia, Christos Papatheodorou, Dimitris Gavrilis, Carlo Meghini

Abstract
The European funded project Ariadne (http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/) aims to develop an infrastructure to aggregate, enrich, integrate and make available the data and services so far developed by the international archaeology research communities. The project enriches and integrates data resources – such as descriptions of datasets, collections, metadata schemas, vocabularies, etc. - and services in order to create a universally accessible shared knowledge base for the archaeology domain.

In the context of Ariadne a crucial concept to integrate and manage different resources is the catalog, or registry. The catalog of Ariadne lists and describes what is available from the project partners, and more generally the whole community of archaeologists, to identify, through refined search mechanisms, the candidate resources for integration. Data registries is in effect a well-known data organization and management approach that provides an environment in which datasets, collections, metadata schemas and vocabularies along with their mappings would be hosted and described by a common schema. Actually, the data registries enhance the accessibility and re-usability of the (research) data.

This paper presents the data model of the Ariadne catalog named Ariadne Catalog Data Model (ACDM) that extends the existing data registry standards. The central notion of the model is the class ArchaeologicalResource, specialized in the classes: (i) DataResource, whose instances represent the various types of data containers (e.g. collections, GIS, datasets) owned by the ARIADNE partners and lent to the project for integration; (ii) LanguageResource, having as instances vocabularies, metadata schemas, gazetteers and mappings (between language resources); (iii) Services, whose instances represent the services owned by the Ariadne partners and lent to the project for integration. The paper presents the aggregation service that is based on the ACDM model and enables the partners to upload huge volumes of metadata to the Catalog as well as the main functionalities of the Ariadne portal (http://ariadne-portal.dcu.gr/).