Semantic Technologies Enhancing Links and Linked data for Archaeological Resources (STELLAR)

The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) was established in 1996 and has developed into a national repository for all digital data from the UK historic environment sector, crosscutting the academic and public and private sectors. The ADS provides online access to over one million metadata records covering the archaeology of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These are brokered on behalf of national government agencies, local government Historic Environment Records, and amenity and period societies and other specialist databases. The ADS has a mandate from the AHRC, NERC and English Heritage, amongst others, to provide a digital repository for all outputs from research they fund. Archaeology globally is seeing increasing use of the Web to disseminate data and the ADS is at the forefront of trying to make such data coherent and cross-searchable.

Not withstanding these impressive, operational achievements, the current situation is one of fragmented datasets and applications, with different terminology systems. The AHRC funded STAR (Semantic Technologies for Archaeological Resources) project, in collaboration with English Heritage (EH), aimed to address these concerns by utilising semantic terminology tools to link digital archive databases, vocabularies and the associated grey literature, exploiting the potential of a high level, core ontology - the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM - ISO21127 standard), extended for archaeological purposes by May and others at EH) and natural language processing techniques. The STAR system cross searches over excavation datasets from different archaeological database schemas. The project is now in its concluding phase and various outcomes have been developed including a cross search and browse demonstrator, a data mapping/extraction tool and a set of semantic web services.

Recent Semantic Web technological developments in 'Linked Data' techniques transpired after the STAR plans were set. The linked data initiative is a move towards the Semantic Web vision of a 'web of data'. Content is made available in RDF, addressed via virtual but persistent URIs that allow HTTP clients to 'negotiate' their preferred representation of the content. This facilitates data reuse by RDF-aware applications and services. This technology is very topical, as seen in announcement of recent initiatives by both US and UK governments to make their data available as linked data.

This proposal seeks to build on the major development of dataset resources at ADS together with the STAR projrct outcomes and in collaboration with Project Partners, English Heritage. Major gains in accessibility, impact and long-term sustainability are possible by leveraging new possibilities for Linked Data and enhancing STAR tools for third party use, so that can be used 'in the wild' (they currently require specialist knowledge).

The aim of the research is to enhance the discoverability, accessibility, impact and sustainability of ADS datasets and STAR project outcomes (services and data resources) by enhancing the interoperability between resources using the latest integration technologies and development of semantic search facilities and associated user interfaces.

Best practice guidelines and tools will be developed both for mapping/extracting archaeological data as RDF and for generating archaeological Linked Data. To this end, third party data providers will use the tools developed by the project to map and extract archaeological datasets into RDF/XML representation conforming to the CIDOC CRM-EH standard ontology. These datasets will be generated as Linked Data. Evaluation will consider both the mapping and linked data generation exercises, taking account of technical and pragmatic issues.

The proposed research will benefit a wide range of users and non-academic organisations, both within the archaeological domain and wider to encompass digital library, museum, archive, government and other communities.

The creation and/or enhancement of STAR tools in the STELLAR project will benefit various groups. The first group to benefit will be the ADS user community. This comprises a broad range of users with the ADS focus being on serving the needs of Higher Education researchers. Other users groups that regularly use ADS resources include National and local government archaeologists and cultural heritage managers, museums archaeologists, commercial archaeologists and members of the public. STELLAR will enhance these audiences access to ADS and MoLAS resources such that the content is both more discoverable, more accessible and, ultimately, more usable for research purposes. Improved discover-ability and access by leveraging the advantages of RDF and Linked Data could potentially lead to the formulation of new research questions, that have previously been impossible to answer due to the siloed nature of the required data sources.

Project partners, English Heritage, will also see direct benefit, both to their own datasets and vocabularies and also as regards the refinement of their extension to the CIDOC CRM ontology for archaeology.

The archaeological data creation and data curation community will also benefit from STELLAR outputs. Best practice methodology and for data extraction and mapping along with a mapping tool will greatly enhance the ability of data creators to participate in enhanced discovery and linking scenarios facilitated by Linked Data. Commercial archaeology units can similarly benefit from wider exposure of their data and the ability to cross search across different datasets.

The project team is actively involved in a number of European and transatlantic projects that have coinciding objects to the STELLAR project, this means that cross-fertilisation and collaboration between such ADS projects as TAG: Transatlantic Archaeological Gateway, the ESFRI DARIAH (ARENA2) is likely. The ADS is obviously well placed to ensure that these projects which are looking specifically at cross-searching and aggregation in an archaeological context benefit from the guidance, methodology and tools developed under STELLAR.

The methods and techniques developed are not confined to the archaeology domain and can be applied more generally. They are particularly relevant to digital libraries, museums and potentially also to archives. The CIDOC CRM is an ISO Standard with particular relevance to the museum and library communities. Glamorgan belongs to the Europeana FP7 Thematic Network - the European Digital Library project, at the broadest level, shares similar goals and will potentially benefit from methods, guidelines and techniques generated by the work. This can also potentially benefit various JISC communities, where the project team has good contacts and previous collaborations.

The recent interest in Linked Data by government circles associated with an open data approach means that the general methods, guidelines and experience will be of benefit to the ongoing efforts in these areas.

The ADS and Glamorgan will engage in the dissemination activities outlined in the proposal. In addition the ADS engages in a series of regular dissemination activities under the direction of the ADS's User Services Manager (STELLAR Co-I). These activities include 2 hard copy newsletters per annum with a circulation of around 2000, regular RSS feed updates and the utilisation of jiscmail email lists (ads-all). The project team regularly presents at national and international conferences (conference attendance specifically for STELLAR is included in this proposal) and engages in an extensive programme of visits and g