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

STELLAR built on outcomes from STAR and led on to participation in the EU FP7 ARIADNE project. The benefits for semantic interoperability in mapping and extracting datasets to an integrating conceptual framework, such as the CIDOC CRM, are widely recognized. However, achieving mappings in practice has required specialist knowledge of the ontology and has been resource intensive. STELLAR provided tools for non-specialist users to map and extract datasets to the ontology. These tools were applied by the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) to extract and publish Linked Data from major commercial archaeology units' excavation datasets, integrated semantically via mapping to the CIDOC CRM ontology. The research enabled ADS (non-specialists in semantic technologies) first foray into Linked Data and represented a major development in practice and capability by ADS and UK archaeological data publication. The open source template based semantic integration method was published and has been used by other archaeologists.