Articles by Allard W. Mees

FAIRification and sharing of open data is an important aspect of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and its archaeology related consortium NFDI4Objects. NFDI4Objects offers domain-specific data-driven hubs to publish and share research data, Linked Open Data (LOD), ontologies, community-driven vocabularies and authority files, such as thesauri. This paper demonstrates the content, challenges and possibilities of the Data Hub ‘archaeology.link’. It consists of five thematic parts: 1) Semantic Modelling using the Linked Archaeological Data Ontology (LADO), 2) publication of domain-specific Linked Open Data, 3) community-driven vocabularies such as thesauri, 4) ontologies and 5) research tools.

In 2020, the Samian Research database began a process of integrating its data within Wikidata through the creation of a set of Samian Research Wikidata items, including Samian Ware Discovery Sites, Samian Ware kiln sites and kiln regions, comprising accurate or approximate geospatial information and a backlink to the Linked Open Data hub ‘archaeology.link’. This approach of creating designated Wikidata items is an efficient way to map the enormous geographic reach of our subject and to call attention to many European archaeological sites and excavations that hitherto lacked a Wikidata identifier. The site of Corinth illustrates an exemplary issue to be solved: ambiguity and different archaeological concepts and ideas. E.g., is it correct to merge Corinth as a Samian Ware Discovery Site with the archaeological site of ancient Corinth? To solve the issue, the broader Wikidata community must be enlisted. This paper describes the challenges in the use case of Corinth and offers solutions within Wikidata.