Data Integration in the Service of Synthetic Research - SAA Vancouver Annual Meeting

Addressing archaeology’s most compelling substantive challenges requires synthetic research that exploits the large and rapidly expanding corpus of systematically collected archaeological data. That, in turn, demands an integration procedure that preserves the semantics of the data when combining datasets collected by multiple investigators who employ different systematics in their recording. To that end, we have developed a general procedure that we call query-directed, on-the-fly data integration that is deployed within the tDAR (the Digital Archaeological Record) digital repository. The integration procedure employs ontologies that are mapped to the original data sets. Integration of the ontology-based dataset representations is done at the time the query is executed, based on the specific content of the query. In this way, the original data recording is preserved and data are aggregated only to the extent necessary to obtain semantic comparability. Our presentation draws examples from the largest application to date: an effort by a research community of Southwest US faunal analysts. Using 24 ontologies developed to cover a broad range of observed faunal variables, we can now integrate faunal data from 37 projects investigating the late prehistoric northern Southwest, including more than 378,000 individually recorded specimens.