D15.2 – Final report on ARIADNEplus services

This deliverable describes the activities carried out within Work Package 15 (WP15) of theARIADNEplus project by the different partners and describes the results achieved.

The work package consists of several individual tasks and subtasks with the overall goal to develop and provide useful services to archaeologists. This means the work package is by nature heterogeneous with stand-alone tasks and services. Efforts have been made to facilitate collaboration between the individual tasks through joint work package meetings. This has resulted in new cross-task contacts being made, and some sharing of expertise to improve services has been done.

A service design template aligning the ARIADNEplus services with the requirements from European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) has been created. In connection with this, the ARIADNEplus AO-CAT ontology has been adapted to the requirements from EOSC Resource Data Model (Task 15.1).

The Visual Media Service (Task 15.2.1) has had a new format added, allowing for 2D visualisation of LIDAR data in DEM format. In addition, three other standards have been added: gITF, ThreeJS and IIIF, supporting various functionality in the service. The service has also been adapted to support integration with the ARIADNEplus infrastructure in D4Science. A visual wizard has been defined to guide Visual Media Service users to add hotspots to a 3D scene easily and quickly. This extension, initially implemented in 3DHOP will allow archaeologists to create interactive links from the digital 3D model to the related documentation without writing any source
code (Task 15.2.2).

Task 15.2.3 reworked the Online 3D Database System for Endangered architectural and archaeological Heritage in the south Eastern MEditerRAnea area (EpHEMERA). EpHEMERA is a service provided by the Cyprus Institute to visualize in 3D archaeological excavations, ancient buildings, and their related documentation. In EpHEMERA, it is possible to visualise, online and through standard web browsers, 3D architectural and archaeological models (classified according to a specific type of risk), query the
database system and retrieve metadata attached to each digital object, and extract geometric and morphological information about the Cultural Heritage asset.

The visualisation and annotation tool of the TSS project have been ported to the OpenLime library and integrated into the Visual Media Service (Task 15.2.1). An additional layer of SVG annotations have been developed and added to the service. The Annotation service have been used and improved in three different pilot projects. (Task 15.3.2).

Various strands of work have been done improving services for text mining and Natural Language Processing (Task 15.4). One of these efforts has been building upon the outcomes of the preceding ARIADNE project. A set of archaeological Named Entity Recognition NLP pipelines were reconfigured and deployed for easier use on the General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) cloud. Another effort has been on extracting temporal archaeological information using two different parallel approaches, normalisation and named entity recognition. A Python development platform has been used to unify the various services.

A Vocabulary Annotation Tool (Task 15.3.1) was developed using the same platform, as part of Task 15.4. The tool facilitates the locating and tagging of vocabulary terms within free text and outputs suggested subject annotations in a range of formats. The GeoPortal service (Task 15.5) is a new REST service designed to manage complex spatio-temporal documents defined by metadata profiles. It was released as a component of the gCube framework. A prototype using the service was deployed and operated to manage archaeological excavation projects (Task 15.7).

Two services for querying the RDF AO-Cat metadata records aggregated by the ARIADNEplus Infrastructure was established (Task 15.6): a full-text index service and a SPARQL endpoint. The full text index service is based on OpenSearch and supports the needed query functionality of the ARIADNEplus portal. The SPARQL endpoint allows performance of semantic queries on the RDF records within the ARIADNEplus data and knowledge cloud.