D3.2: Report on project standards

ARIADNE needs to identify the datasets and collections held by project partners which are available for integration, the metadata standards and database structures adopted by those datasets, existing mappings between datasets and thesauri and controlled vocabularies, and any existing multilingual mappings which are available. Deliverable 3.1 focuses on the metadata standards and thesauri which are available within the domain as a whole. Deliverable D3.2 describes those that are already is use within the consortium. A survey was undertaken to collect information about datasets, metadata standards and controlled vocabularies and thesauri, and a workshop was held in Pisa in November 2013 to help the workpackage leaders to draw conclusions from the initial data collection exercise. The survey revealed a large quantity of data available for integration, but also the heterogeneous nature of much of this data. Several partners hold large collections of datasets of diverse structure, whilst other partners hold single datasets of identical structure. Using the metadata registry tool being developed by ARIADNE it is now clear that the project should be able to develop a catalogue of existing datasets and collections held by project partners, with the scope for addition of datasets held by others. Such a catalogue will provide an invaluable tool for resource discovery for European archaeological researchers. In addition, the survey and workshop also revealed several areas for potential integration of collection at item level, as discussed in Section 6, including grey literature reports and records of sites and monuments. It also became clear that many research queries focus on issues of What, When and Where, and that in many cases the metadata held by partners is sufficient to support these searches. The results of the survey of project partners datasets, metadata standards and vocabularies provides invaluable information which will inform the implementation of the project’s metadata registry and will help the project to plan for ingestion. The datasets that have been identified provide the starting point. The wide very range of content types that have been identified, their specialist nature and complexity confirms the need for ARIADNE to adopt a rich ontology to support their integration into the project infrastructure. The CIDOC-­CRM can provide such an ontology.