ARIADNEplus Vocabulary Mapping Strategy

The ARIADNEplus project aggregated over 3.5 million metadata records describing archaeological sites. These records were converted and integrated to an RDF triple store using a data schema based on the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), then exported to an OpenSearch index for use with the search portal UI. Search is via 3 major facets - place, time and subject. This presentation primarily concerns the subject integration work which involved 59 local vocabularies containing over 19,000 subject terms in 16 different languages. A vocabulary matching tool allowed each data provider to define correctly formatted mappings from their own local vocabularies to a central common 'spine' vocabulary (Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, AAT). Using the resultant mappings, the metadata records were enriched with AAT identifiers. The AAT poly-hierarchical structure was incorporated into the search system, facilitating both multilingual cross search and hierarchical subject expansion. This approach led to a noticeable improvement in both recall and precision.