Digital initiatives have revolutionized archaeological research. The entire research workflow, from acquiring data to analysis, visualization, and publication, has gone digital. This has led to the development of large datasets maintained in digital archaeological repositories at regional or national levels. Such datasets, however, are often structured according to differing schema and employing different vocabularies whilst direct connectivity between independent resources remains comparatively rare.
This work describes ARIADNE, a European initiative aiming to enable interoperability between distributed archaeological repositories in Europe. The ARIADNE e-infrastructure will allow data providers in Europe to register and provide access to their resources through the ARIADNE data portal, enabling cross-searching, comparing, or reusing the data in new ways, and allowing for the development of new research questions that transcend national datasets.
The paper starts with a discussion on the requirements that underpin the development of the ARIADNE infrastructure, elaborating on the existing digital infrastructures for archaeological research in Europe and beyond, and explaining the challenges to achieving interoperability between archaeological data repositories.
It proceeds with a detailed description of the ARIADNE architecture, providing an interesting perspective on the relevant knowledge organization systems, such as ontologies, classification systems, and thesauri that provide the conceptual and terminological basis for consistent interlinking of data as well as on the enabling technologies that facilitate the development of data sharing, discovery, and visualization services.
The last section reports briefly on the evaluation of the ARIADNE portal that brings together existing archaeological research datasets from ARIADNE partners. Initial results indicate that the proposed infrastructure has the potential to act as a single global access point to integrated archaeological information.
Overall, this paper is interesting reading and a useful resource for researchers and practitioners in digital archaeology, offering a good perspective on the subject of archaeological data integration.