A spatio-temporal framework for managing archeological data

Abstract

Space and time are two important characteristics of data in many domains. This is particularly true in the archaeological context where information concerning the discovery location of objects allows one to derive important relations between findings of a specific survey or even of different surveys, and time aspects extend from the excavation time, to the dating of archaeological objects. In recent years, several attempts have been performed to develop a spatio-temporal information system tailored for archaeological data.The first aim of this paper is to propose a model, called $\mathcal {S}$ tar, for representing spatio-temporal data in archaeology. In particular, since in this domain dates are often subjective, estimated and imprecise, $\mathcal {S}$ tar has to incorporate such vague representation by using fuzzy dates and fuzzy relationships among them. Moreover, besides to the topological relations, another kind of spatial relations is particularly useful in archeology: the stratigraphic ones. Therefore, this paper defines a set of rules for deriving temporal knowledge from the topological and stratigraphic relations existing between two findings. Finally, considering the process through which objects are usually manually dated by archeologists, some existing automatic reasoning techniques may be successfully applied to guide such process. For this purpose, the last contribution regards the translation of archaeological temporal data into a Fuzzy Temporal Constraint Network for checking the overall data consistency and reducing the vagueness of some dates based on their relationships with other ones.