A STAR is born:some emerging Semantic Technologies for Archaeological Resources

Following work on data modelling of the varied archaeological systems at English Heritage’sCentre for Archaeology (CfA), a Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) has been produced usingextensions of the higher level CIDOC-CRM ontology. Some initial results of the modelling, using theCIDOC-CRM, were presented at CAA2004 in Prato (Cripps & May 2004 CAA forthcoming). Since thenwork has progressed on refining the modelling and the graphical diagram of the CfA’s archaeologicalprocesses to create a number of further extensions of the CIDOC-CRM to explicitly reflect the greaterdetails (granularity) of CfA’s archaeological information domain. This paper presents the latestarchaeological ontological modelling at English Heritage, and discusses some of the methods used to‘implement’ the modelling by mapping the ontological model to specific data fields in the CfA’s legacysystems, existing databases and planned future systems. This latest EH modelling and mapping workhas been conducted in collaboration with Glamorgan University’s Faculty of Advanced Technology,under the remit of the AHRC funded STAR project (Semantic Technologies for ArchaeologicalResources), and includes the development of the archaeological CIDOC-CRM extensions in RDF format,along with the investigation of the emerging SKOS W3C standard for development of online semanticterminology and knowledge organisation tools and has most recently resulted in a prototype CRM“semantic” browser.[...]