Andrea BONOMI1 / Bernardo RONDELLI1 / Sebastian STRIDE2 / Giuseppe VIZZARI1
(1University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy / 2Barcelona University, Spain)
The SilkRoDE (Silk Roads in the Digital Era) project is a multidisciplinary research network including archaeologists, economists, informatics and geographers aimed at producing a better understanding and awareness of the historical and cultural trajectories of civilizations and communities in Central Asia. This will be achieved through the creation of a knowledge management system to organize, support the collection of various forms of documentation, share and make available the outcomes of the various active and past relevant researches about cultural resources of the area. These resources are fundamental because they underlay the identity, beliefs and hopes of the local communities. However, most of our knowledge about the Cultural Resources of this area comes from the results of the Soviet school of archaeology. Since 1991, work has been continued by local institutions in collaboration with international teams from countries from around the world. But the political and economical situation means that the total number of teams is comparatively small and extremely disparate. Teams often work in isolation, publishing the results of their work in little known journals and in many languages. Research is strongly compartmented and focused on projects with a clearly defined and limited scope. A fundamental element of the SilkRoDE project is the web-based repository that will collect the contributions of various international archaeological research groups that have agreed to gather their efforts to obtain a shared repository of relevant data, information and knowledge. The repository will also include a webGIS and a digital library and it will support semantic forms of navigation among the different contents. The paper will describe the overall structure of the project and in particular the basic functional architecture of the repository, that is based on an ontological approach to the organization and management of data and information.