Towards an Ontology-Driven Information System for Archaeological Pottery Studies: The Greyware Experience

Esther Travé Allepuz,Alfred Mauri Martí,Joan Vicens Tarré,Sonia Medina Gordo,Pablo Del Fresno Bernal

doi:10.3390/app11177989

Esther Travé Allepuz, Alfred Mauri Martí + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/app11177989

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Abstract

The archaeological analysis of medieval and modern pottery has benefited from the consolidation of archaeometry in the domain of Medieval Archaeology in the past few decades. As part of an ongoing research project devoted to the characterization of pottery production, distribution processes and technological transfer, we deal with a considerable amount of data that are very diverse in origin and nature and must be exploited within an integrated information system in order to provide information for historical knowledge. The Greyware system has been designed to fulfil this goal and provides the main categories for pottery analysis within a shareable and reusable scenario. Its development and application prove that a little semantics goes a long way and that the creation of domain ontologies for archaeological research is an iterative process under development, as long as several projects sharing data, resources and time can develop a collaborative framework to maximize the assets of individual expertise and collaborative work. In this paper, we discuss the requirements of the system, the challenge of developing strategies for normalized data management and their potential for exploiting historical vestiges from an integrated perspective.

Highlights

In the past few years, we have developed a semantic approach to historical knowledge and applied the subsequent data modelling to several research projects, gathered under the development of the Horai research system [12]
Understanding Units of Stratigraphy as a specific class of Units of Topography, and considering the chance of grouping several Unit of Stratigraphy (US) in one single Unit of Topography (UT) explanatory of a specific process, the model is extendible to ontologies in the archaeological domain
The system commits the General International Standard Archival Description, and databases therein are ontologydriven according to the domain codes and standards of pottery description, quantification and analysis

Summary

Introduction

The creation of data models after a thorough reflection on the representation of knowledge is a traditional concern of archaeology In this field of study, pottery analysis—understood here as a specific domain of archaeological science– has traditionally pioneered the digital turn in archaeology [2,3,4,5], together with landscape analysis [6,7,8,9]. Time and materiality are crucial variables that must be addressed together with the possibilities of exploiting data from many different sources, regardless of their origin and nature. This is a specific and almost compulsory requirement for the medieval and modern periods, where the abundance of written evidence has to be unavoidably included in the interpretation of material vestiges from the past. Regarding the integrated exploitation and management of information, the ontological development of classes and categories explaining actions occurring at specific moments in time has been a main issue for artificial intelligence and natural language

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