Edeltraud ASPÖCK1 | Gerald HIEBEL2 | Matej DURCO1
(1Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria | 2University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria)

Keywords: excavation data, data archiving, long-term preservation, data re-use

Abstract:
‘A puzzle in 4D’ is a project dealing with the problem of integration of heterogeneous and incomplete digital and non-digital records of archaeological long-term excavations to prepare them for spatio-temporal analysis, long-term archiving based on national and international standards and open-access online publication for specialists and the general public. The project will be a case study to develop an archive for archaeology data at the ÖAW ACDH.
Fieldwork has taken place at Tell el Daba (TED) in Egypt since 1966 and during this time, the archaeological discipline has seen major changes, most notably developments in information technology have caused a shift from analogue to digitally-born data. As a result, the TED archive at the Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology OREA contains a huge and heterogeneous resource of digital and non-digital sources like documents, photographs, plans and drawings.
In our paper we will present work we have carried out so far and discuss the current challenges of the project. We are establishing a metadata model and map it to the CIDOC CRM, an ISO certified standard for heritage documentation and CRMarchaeo, an extension for archaeological excavations. For the types of archive sources that we started digitizing like field drawings we will present the mappings and initial RDF and JSON-LD representations. One of the big challenges in integrating the information sources is the creation of identifiers. We will present our approach to differentiate between identifiers for the documentation sources, the archaeological objects and structures as well as the excavation activities and structures created by excavations.
We will end our presentation with research questions we came up with during our work and questions related to the architecture of a system that can handle the created metadata structure and relate it to the digital resources creating an implementation that satisfies the project requirements.

Relevance conference | Relevance session:
Presentation deals with conference topic of: Re-use and Repurposing of Archaeological and Historical data, in our case excavation data

Innovation:
We will develop an archive for excavation data based on international standards – in Austria

References:
ASPÖCK, Edeltraud et al. (2015): A Puzzle in 4D: Digital Preservation and Reconstruction of an Egyptian Palace. Proceedings of Digital Heritage International Congress 2015, 28.DOI: 10.1109/DigitalHeritage.2015.7419596
Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), Recommended Practice, CCSDS 650.0-M-2 (Magenta Book) Issue 2, June 2012.