Creating Fair Archaeological Data in Norway

This paper presents recent achievements in creating archaeological FAIR data in Norway and making it accessible nationally and internationally. The Norwegian university museums have cooperated since the 1990s to create infrastructures for the collections and photographic archives. The latest infrastructure project is ADED (Archaeological Digital Excavation Documentation).

The ADED project has created a national infrastructure for detailed archaeological excavation data. The Norwegian university museums have used 2D Intrasis for field documentation since 2011. ADED has converted these projects to Postgres and published them at aded.unimus.no with artefacts and photo documentation from each site viewable through links to the artefact database and the digital photo archive. This repository is mapped to CIDOC-CRM to facilitate integration into ARIADNEplus.

Data can be queried, accessed and downloaded from any individual project, as well as across multiple projects.

The ADED website has links to kulturminnesok.no — the public version of the National Heritage and Environment Register, Askeladden — and will also have links to excavation reports archived at the university museums.

ADED has made years of archaeological results available for researchers and the general public, and the open publishing contributes to a democratisation of knowledge through a single website that gives access to measurements, photo documentation, and artefacts from all excavations undertaken in Norway over the last 10 years.

A future extension of ADED will be the integration of 3D data. KHM and the other Norwegian university museums will use more 3D documentation of excavations. KHM addresses this through BItFROST, where one of the goals is to refine methodology and encourage re-use. To achieve this, we have chosen to use 3DHOP to give online access to the 3D models. The BItFROST interface, built on 3DHOP, enables annotation and sharing of models, thus facilitating the active exchange of ideas in research, teaching and outreach.