A STAR is born: some emerging Semantic Technologies for Archaeological Resources

Following work on data modelling of the varied archaeological systems at English Heritage’s Centre for Archaeology (CfA), a Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) has been produced using extensions of the higher level CIDOC-CRM ontology. Some initial results of the modelling, using the CIDOC-CRM, were presented at CAA2004 in Prato (Cripps and May 2004 CAA forthcoming). Since then work has progressed on refining the modelling and the graphical diagram of the CfA’s archaeological processes to create a number of further extensions of the CIDOC-CRM to explicitly reflect the greater details (granularity) of CfA’s archaeological information domain. This paper presents the latest archaeological ontological modelling at English Heritage, and discusses some of the methods used to ‘implement’ the modelling by mapping the ontological model to specific data fields in the CfA’s legacy systems, existing databases and planned future systems. This latest EH modelling and mapping work has been conducted in collaboration with Glamorgan University’s Faculty of Advanced Technology, under the remit of the AHRC funded STAR project (Semantic Technologies for Archaeological Resources), and includes the development of the archaeological CIDOC-CRM extensions in RDF format, along with the investigation of the emerging SKOS W3C standard for development of online semantic terminology and knowledge organisation tools and has most recently resulted in a prototype CRM “semantic” browser.