KOS-based Enrichment of Archaeological Fieldwork Reports

Semantic enrichment techniques and tools based on knowledge organization systems (KOS) have an important role to play in supporting information discovery. This paper reports on initial work investigating and developing KOS-based automatic indexing recommendation tools (for final intellectual judgment) in the archaeology domain. Within the UK, the OASIS online index of fieldwork events and their unpublished reports has been a major initiative to make archaeological fieldwork available to a wider public. OASIS is hosted by the Archaeology Data Service and is supported by Historic England and Historic Environment Scotland. OASIS reports are contributed by a wide variety of organisations and subject indexing is inconsistent and sometimes sparse, although use of standard KOS from the Forum on Information Standards in Heritage is encouraged.

Initial results from a pilot case study for an automatic (KOS-based) subject indexing recommendation system are reported. Findings include the need for some pre-processing of the KOS vocabularies for NLP purposes and the need for post-processing filters to prioritise subject indexing significant for the document in question. The paper goes on to reflect on evaluation issues for such systems and to make some general comparisons with automatic indexing for Name Authorities and Named Entity Recognition.