Semantic Solutions for Democratizing Archaeological and Numismatic Data Analysis

Abstract

Museums, heritage agencies and other institutions responsible for managing archaeological cultural heritage across Europe are engaged in developing digital platforms to better open their collections to the public as a common resource for the purposes of discovering, learning about, and sharing our common past. This paper explores the potential of new semantic computing technologies in democratizing not only public access to digital cultural heritage records, but also to computational and Linked Open Data -assisted data analysis and knowledge discovery. As a case study, we consider archaeological and numismatic Open Data services in Finland, and discuss the research results obtained during the ongoing development work for the CoinSampo framework for opening Finnish and international numismatic data. Existing digital cultural heritage services are often built with the needs of professional collections management in mind. The presentation of the records is typically structured after the familiar format established for the printed catalogues of yesteryear, with few analytical tools that would take advantage of the potential of digital data to probe and visualize internal relationships and patterns within the full body of the opened material. CoinSampo, however, will provide scientific tools to new audiences among the non-professional public who have not enjoyed such a level of access to numismatic data. The broad range of target audiences we envisage includes collections managers, who will benefit from enhanced access to their own data for updating records and for error detection and correction, as well as academic researchers interested in using the material in scientific analysis. Importantly, it also includes non-professional groups such as coin collectors, educators, local historians, and the archaeological hobby metal-detectorists who produce most of the new coin finds entering the national collections in Finland and in other European countries where detecting is legal. By adopting a citizen science and participatory heritage approach in the development of Open Data services, we aim to promote a technological model for cultural heritage dissemination that addresses the needs of a wide spectrum of different user audiences inside and outside the professional sphere.