Preparing the Romanian National Archaeological Datasets for ARIADNE

Abstract

The contribution of the Romanian National Institute of Heritage (NIH) to the ARIADNE catalogue consists of 22,298 cultural resources, 18,277 of which are archaeological sites and 4021 are fieldwork reports. The two types of data were extracted from the two repositories that INP manages: the National Archaeological Repertory and the Chronicle of Archaeological Research. In Romania, the legislation regarding the protection of archaeological heritage establishes the National Archaeological Repertory as the means of managing the scientific data relating to the archaeological heritage, and of mapping archaeological sites as well as the threats to them. In addition, the same legislation stipulates that preliminary excavation reports should be published in a volume edited by the National Archaeology Commission, if the research was financed by public funds. As a result, for better dissemination, the reports are uploaded to a database. Both the Repertory and the Chronicle are accessible online through the INP management web portal. In order to fulfil the NIH's obligations within the ARIADNEplus project, several corrections and changes were made to the structures of both repositories (RAN and Chronicle) and data had to be updated. First of all, a photo upload module that illustrates both an archaeological site, perceived as a landscape, and its various components was developed. At the same time, the NIH team carried out a campaign to map the archaeological sites using coordinates in the WGS84 system, using various cartographic resources, such as topographic maps, aerial photographs and satellite images. The third activity consisted of creating a hierarchical list of archaeological site types and their components to support a more accurate description and retrieval of database records. Conversion of the RAN archaeological records to AO-Cat compliant RDF data was the fourth activity conducted by NIIH in order to include the RAN records in the ARIADNE Knowledge Base. Subsequently, a hierarchical list of the archaeological periods used in Romanian archaeology was developed, where every period is described by three main components: name, time interval and geographical area. This list has been converted to the PeriodO format and will be imported into the gazetteer.