Little Minions and SPARQL Unicorns as tools for archaeology

In our daily work, some small self-made scripts and home-grown small applications significantly help us to get work done. These little helpers – you can call them “little minions” – often reduce our workload or optimise our workflows. Therefore, the `Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology` (CAA) created a working group on `Little Minions` (http://littleminions.link) focusing on development and customization of FLOS Software for archaeology. Furthermore, the WWW gives researchers the possibility of sharing their research data and enables the community to participate in the scientific discourse to create previously unknown knowledge. But much of these shared data are not findable or accessible, thus resulting in modern ‘unknown data dragons’. To overcome these shortcomings, a set of techniques can be used: Semantic Web and Linked Open Data (LOD) (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3345711). This is where the CAA SIG on Semantics and LOUD in Archaeology (http://datadragon.link) comes into play and wants to promote the LOD ideas. 

Moreover, there are a variety of volunteered community driven data collecting initiatives like Wikidata. The Wikidata community created a lot of tools to interact with Wikimedia repositories. On the other hand there is a lack of user-friendly, easy to use and openly available archaeology-related tools for LOD. The Digital Humanities Community may use Recogito or Annotorious, to overcome this bottleneck, but for the archaeological community, the SPARQL Unicorn idea and principles may help (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3742185).

To summarize the three aforementioned aspects, there is a lack of FLOS GIS Tools for LOD and archaeology. The SPARQLing Unicorn QGIS plugin (https://github.com/sparqlunicorn/sparqlunicornGoesGIS) addresses the problem of the lack of availability of tools for Semantic Web geodata. The plugin called “sparqlunicorn” (fig.1) may be installed from within QGIS (by activating experimental plugins for installation) or downloaded from the central QGIS repository (https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/sparqlunicorn). The SPARQL Unicorn allows the execution of Linked Data queries in (Geo)SPARQL to selected triplestores and geo-enabled SPARQL endpoints and thus prepares the results of the queries in QGIS for the geocommunity. The plugin currently offers three functions: (a) simplified querying of Semantic Web data sources (b) enrichment of geodata and (c) transformation of GeoJSON to RDF data.

Function A allows assisted querying of several archaeological related triplestores e.g. Wikidata, Nomisma, Kerameikos, Pleiades, and Roman Open Data. For assisting the user, example queries, a concept search and templates are given (fig. 2). For example: You could query the Wikidata triple store for prehistoric art sites (fig. 3) or the Squirrel triple store (https://digits.mainzed.org/squirrels) for military camps of the limes (fig. 4, red dots). The results are saved as a QGIS vector layer. 

Function B allows the enrichment of a given geodataset using Semantic Web resources from the Linked Open Data Cloud, especially Wikidata (e.g. the elevation level of towns along the Roman Limes, fig. 5). Geospatial data is always seen in a context of usage which usually requires additional data from different knowledge domains. Semantically interpreted Linked Data may represent such a resource for data enrichment. 
Function C converts geospatial information e.g. from GeoJSON into RDF, so that this information might be represented for the purpose of publishing archaeological geodata as Linked Data.