ARIADNE: Building a European data infrastructure for archaeology

This is a pdf copy of the PowerPoint slides used for this presentation in the SAA symposium. ARIADNE is a four-year EU FP7 Infrastructures funded project, made up of 24 partners across 16 European countries, which hold archaeological data in at least 13 languages. These are the accumulated outcome of the research of individuals, teams and institutions, but form a vast and fragmented corpus, and their potential has been constrained by difficult access and non-homogeneous perspectives. ARIADNE aims to bring together and integrate existing archaeological research data infrastructures, so researchers can use these distributed datasets in combination, and in new ways. This paper will give an overview of the progress of the ARIADNE project, focusing on efforts to create a shared cyber-infrastructure into which metadata is gathered, and a portal to allow cross-search of this metadata. To this end, mapping work has been carried out to facilitate searching across space, time and subjects, using Linked Open Data (LOD). This work represents LOD best practice by incorporating existing international initiatives such as the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, and Pelagios/Pleiades, and contributing to emerging best practice initiatives like PeriodO. As ARIADNE enters its final year, conclusions can begin to be drawn about the challenges faced along the way, and possible directions for the future.