STAR (Semantic Tools for Archaeological Resources)

The aim of the STAR project was to investigate the potential of semantic terminology tools for widening and improving access to UK digital archaeology resources, including disparate data sets and associated grey literature. Major outcomes included a research demonstrator that cross searched extracts of excavation datasets with different schemas. These datasets were mapped to a core ontology complemented by English Heritage thesauri and glossaries. RDF representations of key elements were extracted. An online publication discusses details of various scenarios explored with the Demonstrator, including a video of the system in use (section 3.1 – Hearths).

Information extraction techniques were applied to key concepts in the grey literature (an extract of the OASIS corpus operated by the Archaeology Data Service), producing subject metadata in the same semantic representation as the extracted data. This allowed a unified searching of the different datasets and the grey literature in terms of semantic framework.