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

The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) was established in 1996 and has developed into a national repository for all digital data from the UK historic environment sector, crosscutting the academic and public and private sectors. The ADS provides online access to over one million metadata records covering the archaeology of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These are brokered on behalf of national government agencies, local government Historic Environment Records, and amenity and period societies and other specialist databases. The ADS has a mandate from the AHRC, NERC and English Heritage, amongst others, to provide a digital repository for all outputs from research they fund. Archaeology globally is seeing increasing use of the Web to disseminate data and the ADS is at the forefront of trying to make such data coherent and cross-searchable.\n\nNot withstanding these impressive, operational achievements, the current situation is one of fragmented datasets and applications, with different terminology systems. The AHRC funded STAR (Semantic Technologies for Archaeological Resources) project, in collaboration with English Heritage (EH), aimed to address these concerns by utilising semantic terminology tools to link digital archive databases, vocabularies and the associated grey literature, exploiting the potential of a high level, core ontology - the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM - ISO21127 standard), extended for archaeological purposes by May and others at EH) and natural language processing techniques. The STAR system cross searches over excavation datasets from different archaeological database schemas. The project is now in its concluding phase and various outcomes have been developed including a cross search and browse demonstrator, a data mapping/extraction tool and a set of semantic web services.\n\nRecent Semantic Web technological developments in 'Linked Data' techniques transpired after the STAR plans were set. The linked data initiative is a move towards the Semantic Web vision of a 'web of data'. Content is made available in RDF, addressed via virtual but persistent URIs that allow HTTP clients to 'negotiate' their preferred representation of the content. This facilitates data reuse by RDF-aware applications and services. This technology is very topical, as seen in announcement of recent initiatives by both US and UK governments to make their data available as linked data. \n\nThis proposal seeks to build on the major development of dataset resources at ADS together with the STAR projrct outcomes and in collaboration with Project Partners, English Heritage. Major gains in accessibility, impact and long-term sustainability are possible by leveraging new possibilities for Linked Data and enhancing STAR tools for third party use, so that can be used 'in the wild' (they currently require specialist knowledge). \n\nThe aim of the research is to enhance the discoverability, accessibility, impact and sustainability of ADS datasets and STAR project outcomes (services and data resources) by enhancing the interoperability between resources using the latest integration technologies and development of semantic search facilities and associated user interfaces. \n\nBest practice guidelines and tools will be developed both for mapping/extracting archaeological data as RDF and for generating archaeological Linked Data. To this end, third party data providers will use the tools developed by the project to map and extract archaeological datasets into RDF/XML representation conforming to the CIDOC CRM-EH standard ontology. These datasets will be generated as Linked Data. Evaluation will consider both the mapping and linked data generation exercises, taking account of technical and pragmatic issues.\n\n