Integration of complementary archaeological sources

1
Integration of complementary archaeological
sources

• Martin Doerr
• Maria Theodoridou
• ICS-FORTH, Heraklion, Crete, Greece
• Kurt Schaller
• Magistrat der Stadt WienGeschäftsgruppe Kultur
  und Wissenschaft Stadtarchäologie, Wien,
  Austria
•  

2
Outline

• Problem statement Working context
• Objective
• Approach
• Technical description
• Results
• Conclusion, future work

3
Project VBI ERAT LVPA The Internet Tracks of the
Roman She-Wolf

• Traditional corpora
• very high quality, difficult to maintain,
  difficult to search, uncorrelated to
  complementary resources
• New Database Projects
• varying quality, overlapping contents,
  continuously updated, easy to search,
  uncorrelated between each other.
• Altogether
• A conglomerate of highly interrelated
  archaeological sources
• of overwhelming detail and volume
• Ubi-erat-lupa A European Culture 2000 Project
• An aggregation of complementary scientific
  databases and corpora describing finds with
  inscriptions and iconography of the Roman era
• to create a body of unique archaeological
  knowledge in digital form.

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VBI ERAT LVPA Objective

• creation of a global index about a set of
  semi-autonomous sources for global access to the
  unified knowledge
• integration of complementary information under a
  common ontology/schema and identification of
  common elements in different sources
• development of an integration algorithm that
  converges to the best state of knowledge und
  continuous update
• creation of a research tool for formulating
  queries of archaeological content to detect
  contextual relationships that cannot be derived
  from interpreting the sources in isolation

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Approach

• Develop a semantic network based on the CIDOC
  CRM model to integrate the complementary
  archaeological sources
• Data, relevant to global querying over all
  contents, are extracted, transformed and stored
  in an RDF repository, that is incrementally
  updated over time.
• Integration in two phases
• source schema is intellectually interpreted in
  terms of the CIDOC model
• non canonical data reported to respective
  source
• mistakes in sources removed, quality of source
  improved
• actual data automatically transformed and stored
  into an RDF repository
• an a posteriori data cleaning process removes as
  many duplicates as can be (semi-) automatically
  detected

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The CIDOC CRMTop-level Entities relevant for
Integration
E55 Types
E39 Actor
E41 Appellations
refer to / identifie
affect or / refer to
E31 Document
E5 Event
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The CIDOC CRM VBI-ERAT-LVPARepository Indexing
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Complementary archaeological sources

• Stone data bases
• Lupa - 7000 archaeological records, City of
  Vienna, Austria
• Arachne - 40.000 archaeological records, Antike
  Plastik, Cologne
• Name data bases
• ONOMASTICON PROVINCIARVM EVROPAE LATINARVM (OPEL)
• Information about the amount and distribution of
  Roman names in the European provinces of the
  empire, City of Vienna, Austria
• Epigraphic corpora
• CIL Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum
• AE L'Année Epigraphique
• Inscriptions Clauss/Slaby University of
  Frankfurt
• Thesauri / Dictionaries
• TGN Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
• Alexandria DL Gazetteer 5.000.000 current place
  names (web service)
• Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World
  Map-by-Map Directory provides information about
  every place or feature in the Atlas

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Mapping stone data bases to CIDOC-CRM
P102F.has_title
P1F.is identified_by
P2F.has_type
P106B.forms part of
P70B.is documented in
P106B.forms part of
POLUPA.5
P12B.was present at
P7F.took place at
P55F.has current location
P89F.falls within
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Mapping stone data bases to CIDOC-CRM
P65F.shows visual item
P150F shows characters
P151F has transcription
P152F has clear text
P1F.is identified by P70B.is documented in
POLUPA.5
P106B.forms part of
P106B.forms part of
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Mapping epigraphic corpora to CIDOC-CRM
P150F.shows characters
P151F.has transcription
P1F.is identified by P70B.is documented in
P106B.forms part of
P106B.forms part of
P106B.forms part of
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Mapping OPEL to CIDOC-CRM
P67B.is referred to by
P70B.is documented in
P65B.is shown by
P139F.has alternative form
P2F.has type
P106B.forms part of
P12B.was present at
P7F.took place at
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Integration Into One Resource
POLUPA.5
Stone data bases
Name data bases
Epigraphic corpora
Thesauri/Dictionaries
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Identity Problem

• Two approaches
• a) avoid taking two different items for the same
  gt use local id, where uniqueness is guaranteed
• b) try to find global names with a high chance
  to match.
• Lupa solution is a)
• We give a serial number to any new object we
  insert
• We use the serial number of the source database.
• Example P.O arachne.45305
• or P.O lupa.4501
• We maintain local id in the global index as valid
  names and remove detected duplicates
  continuously.
• Cost-benefit optimization of over- and
  under-identification!

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Reactive Data Cleaning Initial Data
has title
has type
is identified by
shows visual item
shows visual item
is identified by
POARACHNE.80581
has title
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Reactive Data Cleaning Result
has title
has type
is identified by
shows visual item
is identified by
has title
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VBI ERAT LVPA Results

• A method and architecture for integration of
  diverse archaeological copora on the Roman stone
  monuments under the CIDOC CRM model.
• We developed an efficient way for place name
  recognition
• We are developing a research tool suitable for
  formulating queries and drawing conclusions on
  archaeological data
• detection of contextual relationships that cannot
  be derived from interpreting the sources in
  isolation
• a method of identifying epigraphic references and
  finds
• test bed for the CIDOC CRM model - proved its
  adequacy
• First large scale integration project of multiple
  complementary resources as a global index to the
  original sources

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Future work

• integrate more data sources
• support a mechanism to visualize a source
• support an automatic mapping process so that
  archaeologists will be able to maintain the
  system b themselves.