Representing quantitative documentation of 3D cultural heritage artefacts with CIDOC CRMdig

Abstract

In this paper, we will explore the theme of the documentation of 3D cultural heritage assets, not only as entire artefacts but also including the interesting features of the object from an archaeological perspective. Indeed, the goal is supporting archaeological research and curation, providing a different approach to enrich the documentation of digital resources and their components with corresponding measurements, combining semantic and geometric techniques. A documentation scheme based on CIDOC, where measurements on digital data have been included extending CIDOC CRMdig, is discussed. To annotate accurately the components and features of the artefacts, a controlled vocabulary named Cultural Heritage Artefact Partonomy (CHAP) has been defined and integrated into the scheme as a SKOS taxonomy to showcase the proposed methodology. CHAP concerns Coroplastic, which is the study of ancient terracotta figurines and in particular the Cypriot production. Two case studies have been considered: the terracotta statues from the port of Salamis and the small clay statuettes from the Ayia Irini sanctuary. Focussing both on the artefacts and their digital counterparts, the proposed methodology supports effectively typical operations within digital libraries and repositories (e.g. search, part-based annotation), and more specific objectives such as the archaeological interpretation and digitally assisted classification, as proved in a real archaeological scenario. The proposed approach is general and applies to different contexts, since it is able to support any archaeological research where the goal is an extensive digital documentation of tangible findings including quantitative attributes.