Archaeotools: Data mining, facetted classification and E-archaeology

The project consists of three work packages each dealing with a particular type of data. Workpackage 1 - The underlying dataset comprises over 1,000,000 records (held in Oracle RDBMS) aggregated from the National Monuments Records of Scotland, Wales and England as well as Historic Environment Records from numerous local authorities and the ADS’s own archive holdings. The facets selected will be standard hierarchical ‘What’, ‘Where’, and ‘When’ facets plus a ‘Media’ facet to allow the selection of particular subsets of resources. The facets are populated from existing thesauri (e.g. the Thesaurus of Monument types) in XML format and extended/integrated to allow for geographical differences, such as terminological differences in monument and period types between Scotland and England. The Archaeotools project also integrates thesauri served in XML by Simple Knowledge Organisation Systems (SKOS ) based web services developed by the AHRC-funded Semantic Tools for Archaeology project (STAR ) based at the University of Glamorgan. Work Package 2 - deals with primariy unpublished archaeological reports (grey literature), in total approximately 1000 reports ranging from 10 to 500 hundred of pages. These reports are published by a wide range of archaeological organisations. As an example, OASIS project actively gathers digital versions of grey literature fieldwork reports and currently holds around 2300. This total grows by around 50-100 reports a month; all reports can be downloaded, free of charge, from the ADS. Work Package 3 - The system is extended to capture metadata from legacy historical documents, using the PSAS (annual Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, from 1851 to 1999) as an exemplar corpus and utilising the University of Edinburgh’s geoXwalk service to recast place names and locations extracted from text as national grid references (NGRs), allowing enhanced geospatial searching of the data.