Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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then mapped to the CRM-EH so that both the extracted data sets and the textual documents could be
searched by the same semantic metadata terms. 232 This project has thus successfully demonstrated one
approach to re<strong>in</strong>tegrat<strong>in</strong>g the textual and material records with<strong>in</strong> the doma<strong>in</strong> of archaeology, a goal
also sought by the Archaeotools project discussed below.
While the STAR project concluded <strong>in</strong> 2010, this research led to another currently funded project
entitled STELLAR (Semantic Technologies Enhanc<strong>in</strong>g L<strong>in</strong>ks and L<strong>in</strong>ked data for Archaeological
Resources). 233 The STELLAR project is work<strong>in</strong>g with the ADS to “enhance the discoverability,
accessibility, impact and susta<strong>in</strong>ability of ADS datasets and STAR project outcomes (services and data
resources)” by focus<strong>in</strong>g on semantic <strong>in</strong>teroperability <strong>in</strong> terms of state-of-the-art data-<strong>in</strong>tegration
techniques. This project will develop a series of guidel<strong>in</strong>es for the mapp<strong>in</strong>g and extraction of diverse
archaeological resources <strong>in</strong>to a RDF-XML representation of the CIDOC CRM-EH ontology as well as
for the publish<strong>in</strong>g of these resources as L<strong>in</strong>ked Data, create a mapp<strong>in</strong>g tool to assist nonspecialist users
<strong>in</strong> the mapp<strong>in</strong>g process, and publish all the extracted archaeological data as L<strong>in</strong>ked Data on the web.
Seek<strong>in</strong>g to address the various issues outl<strong>in</strong>ed above, several recent <strong>in</strong>itiatives have sought to provide
the beg<strong>in</strong>n<strong>in</strong>gs of a cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure for provid<strong>in</strong>g both advanced and mean<strong>in</strong>gful <strong>in</strong>tegrated access
to and the preservation of archaeological data. The Mellon Foundation–funded Archaeo<strong>in</strong>formatics 234
was “established as a collaborative organization to design, seek fund<strong>in</strong>g for, and direct a set of
cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure <strong>in</strong>itiatives for archaeology.” This project ran from 2007 to 2008. Accord<strong>in</strong>g to the
project summary, the <strong>in</strong>itiative sought to provide preservation for both archaeological data and
metadata and to build a digital archive for data that would provide access to both scholars and the
general public.
While a number of scholars <strong>in</strong>terviewed by the CSHE had great hopes for projects such as
Archaeo<strong>in</strong>formatics, most still believed that “one of the biggest obstacles is the question of standards
for <strong>in</strong>tegrat<strong>in</strong>g idiosyncratic data sets on a large scale, as well as the difficulties of secur<strong>in</strong>g buy-<strong>in</strong>
from other stakeholders of archaeological data” (Harley et al. 2010, 91). Similarly, Stuart Dunn <strong>in</strong> his
overview of develop<strong>in</strong>g a specific VRE <strong>in</strong> archaeology commented that projects were often good at
creat<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>frastructure, but only at the project level. “Because archaeological fieldwork is by def<strong>in</strong>ition
regional or site-specific, excavation directors generally focus the majority of their efforts at any one
time on relatively small-scale data gather<strong>in</strong>g activities,” Dunn declared, add<strong>in</strong>g, “this produces bodies
of data that might be conceptually comparable, but are not standardized or consistent” (Dunn 2009).
The “successor” project to Archaeo<strong>in</strong>formatics, which is named Digital Antiquity, 235 has thus sought
to address the challenges of diverse and non<strong>in</strong>teroperable standards, <strong>in</strong>tegrat<strong>in</strong>g idiosyncratic data,
project-specific <strong>in</strong>frastructures, and limited stakeholder participation. Digital Antiquity is a
“collaborative organization devoted to enhanc<strong>in</strong>g preservation and access to digital records of
archaeological <strong>in</strong>vestigation.” With fund<strong>in</strong>g from the Mellon Foundation and the National Science
Foundation (NSF), this project has built an “on-l<strong>in</strong>e digital repository that is able to provide
preservation, discovery, and access for data and documents produced by archaeological projects.”
Named tDAR (the Digital Archaeological Record 236 ), this repository already <strong>in</strong>cludes more than 500
232 A separate “semantic <strong>in</strong>dices portal,” named Andronikos, has also been developed that provides access to the entire OASIS corpus.
(http://andronikos.kyklos.co.uk/)
233 http://hypermedia.research.glam.ac.uk/kos/STELLAR/
234 http://archaeo<strong>in</strong>formatics.org/
235 http://www.digitalantiquity.org/
236 http://www.tdar.org/