Developing common European archaeological concepts through extending the CIDOC CRM within ARIADNE

Martin DOERR¹ / Gerald HIEBEL²
(¹Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), Heraklion, Greece / ²Universität Innsbruck, Austria)

Keywords: Archaeology, Information Integration, Ontology, CIDOC CRM

Abstract:
Infrastructures and services for sharing archaeological documentation have to be based on a common understanding of the underlying concepts of documentation. ARIADNE (Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe) defined as standard Conceptual Reference Model the CIDOC-CRM (ISO 21127:2006 – A reference ontology for the interchange of cultural heritage information). The Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH) will lead the extension of the model to improve its fit for specific subdomains that are important for archaeological research. Among others this will be site descriptions (in particular as concerns excavation data), scientific data (e.g. chemical and physical analyses) and complex spatial, temporal and part-whole concepts. Basic concepts are already present in the CIDOC CRM but they are often rather general and do not allow to include the specificity of information in the archaeological documentation that is often required in these subdomains.
The methodology for building the envisaged extensions is to analyze existing data structures and datasets of project partners and use the bottom-up ontology engineering process that was developed during the building of the CIDOC CRM. The participation of leading European national archaeological institutions in ARIADNE is a unique opportunity to develop a shared conceptualization of the European archaeological community.
With selected examples of data structures and data sets from the national archaeological institutions we will present the methodological approach and the first results of common European archaeological concepts refining the CIDOC CRM concepts.