Abstract
Aim of this thesis is to design an information system for the support of archaeological excavations. Archaeological excavation is examined as a concept with two facets. On one hand it is examined as an “event”, as defined by Computer Science and on the other hand as a “human activity” that organically produces its own archive, as defined by Archival Science. Firstly, a brief overview is given of the theory relating to Archaeology and archaeological excavations, of the methods of knowledge representation which is essential for the development information systems, as well as, of the standards that have been developed in the domain of cultural heritage for the description and metadata semantic mapping of the information sources and their collections. Furthermore, the common ground of fundamental concepts, like “archive”, “collection”, “event” and “provenance” is studied as they are defined by different scientific domains. Lastly, after an overview of similar projects of archaeological documentation in Greece and internationally is completed, the conceptual model of a database is proposed for the documentation of different excavation events, their discovered artifacts and the produced documents, as part of a common archive of each excavation. This will result in the creation of a ledger for every artifact and document, which will be updated over time, with the starting point being the archaeological excavation. Consequently, the documentation of the provenance will have been achieved of both the excavation archive and the artifacts discovered during the excavation. The design of the database conceptual model is based on the entities of the CIDOC conceptual reference model hierarchy and the ones of its extensions that have been developed for it aiming at archaeological documentation support.
Published Version
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