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Making Archaeological Data Easily Accessible

Accessing findings from archaeological excavations will soon become easier thanks to researchers at the University of Glamorgan.

The University’s Hypermedia Research Unit has recently been awarded £110k from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for its Semantic Technologies Enhancing Links and Linked data for Archaeological Resources (STELLAR)project – a collaboration with York University’s Archaeology Department and English Heritage.

The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) at York has a mandate to provide a digital repository for outputs from research funded by AHRC, Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), English Heritage and other bodies. The use of the web in disseminating archaeological data has increased rapidly in recent years, and the ADS holds a wide range of datasets from archaeological excavations.

Professor Doug Tudhope, University of Glamorgan who is leading the project said, “Currently datasets and applications are fragmented and isolated. Different terminology and data organisation hinders search and comparison across datasets. As a result archaeological data is rarely reused and re-examined in light of evolving research questions and interpretations. A previous project STAR (Semantic Technologies for Archaeological Resources) addressed these issues by developing semantic and natural language processing techniques to link digital archive databases and the associated grey literature. STELLAR aims to generalise and extend the data extraction tools produced by STAR and enable third party data providers to use them.”

The extracted data will be represented in standard formats that allow the datasets to be cross searched and linked by a variety of Semantic Web tools, following a linked data approach.