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Tools and Ontologies for the Aggregation and Management of Cypriot Archaeological Datasets

Valentina Vassallo, Maria Theodoridou, Achille Felicetti and Avgoustinos Avgousti

Cite this as: Vassallo, V., Theodoridou, M., Felicetti, A. and Avgousti, A. 2023 Tools and Ontologies for the Aggregation and Management of Cypriot Archaeological Datasets, Internet Archaeology 64. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.64.10

Summary

This article focuses on the aggregation of Cypriot archaeological datasets, digitally archived in local repositories, into the ARIADNE portal. It considers, in particular, the development of an application profile for inscriptions and presents the integration of two collections, consisting of ancient coins and inscriptions carved on stones. It highlights the tools and ontologies developed for the aggregation and management of these digital resources, as well as the related pipeline and activities. The issues encountered are also presented, plus the solutions adopted and the successful results in the data aggregation of these collections into the infrastructure. Currently, thanks to the pipeline, and the semantic tools developed and used in ARIADNE, a collection of Cypriot medieval coins and a corpus of Ancient Greek inscriptions are now more widely accessible to the archaeological community.

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  • Keywords: Semantic tools, ontologies, data aggregation, data management, research infrastructures, ARIADNE portal, Cypriot archaeology, numismatic, epigraphy
  • Accepted: 26 July 2023. Published: 31 October 2023
  • Funding: This article is based upon work from ARIADNEplus and COST Action SEADDA, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).
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Corresponding author: Valentina VassalloORCID logo
v.vassallo@cyi.ac.cy
The Cyprus Institute (CyI
Science and Technology for Archaeology and Culture Research Centre (STARC)
APAC Labs
Cyprus

Maria Theodoridou ORCID logo
Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)
Institute of Computer Science (ICS), Greece

Achille Felicetti ORCID logo
PIN, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy

Avgoustinos Avgousti ORCID logo
The Cyprus Institute (CyI)
APAC Labs
Cyprus

Full text

Figure 1: Cypriot archaeological materials aggregated in the ARIADNE portal

Figure 2: The Cypriot medieval coin collection in DIOPTRA

Figure 3: The Reflectance Transformation Images (RTI) module is embedded in the Cypriot medieval coin collection for digital visualisation and analysis of the artefacts

Figure 4: The Archaia Kypriaki Grammateia in the STARC Repo

Figure 5: The Archaia Kypriaki Grammateia published in DIOPTRA

Figure 6: The schematisation of the aggregation pipeline for a) the coin collection and b)

the inscriptions corpus

Figure 7: CRMtex, CIDOC CRM and AO-Cat modelling of a medieval coin bearing inscriptions on the obverse and reverse sides

Figure 8: CRMtex, CIDOC CRM and AO-Cat modelling of the various investigation operations (i.e. reading, understanding, transliterating and translating) of an ancient Greek inscription from Cyprus

Figure 9: Publication of the Cypriot medieval coins collection in the ARIADNE Portal

Figure 10: Exploring epigraphs in the Research Space platform

Figure 11: Display of a specific inscription

Table 1: ARIADNEplus Semantic Search categories and relations

Table 2: Collections with epigraphic data

Table 3: Indicative inscription queries

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