Integrating Archaeological Datasets: the ARIADNE Portal.

One of the emerging needs of the archaeological community is represented by the importance of availing of systems that allow to tackle new research questions, by querying diverse available resources. Usually, archaeological digital data is stored in non-standardised individual databases with a limited possibility of integration and a high level of fragmentation. The EU-funded project ARIADNE, has developed an e-infrastructure which enables the integration of archaeological datasets from various different institutions, integrating resource discovery metadata using controlled vocabularies, thesauri, gazetteers and ontology (CIDOC CRM). This paper presents the ARIADNE infrastructure, describing the activities undertaken by the project to achieve interoperability of archaeological resources at the dataset and item level. Moreover, the architecture of the ARIADNE Infrastructure and the Portal, with the different ways to search and access the resources are described.