Articles by Oleg Missikoff

Despite the fact that an increasing number of researchers in the cultural heritage sector is recognising the advantages that could derive from the use of knowledge management methodologies and tools, a lack of awareness of the basic principles of this discipline is still rather evident. Key concepts like “knowledge representation”, metadata, conceptual modeling, syntactic or semantic interoperability, ontologies, can prove difficult to understand (and even more difficult to apply) for researchers with a background in the humanities. This contribution, therefore, aims at clarifying the theoretical reference framework through the concrete analysis of archaeological materials. In fact, while it seems easier to borrow definitions and theoretical concepts or to artificially create even very complex conceptual models (e.g. the CIDOC CRM, which has recently been recognised as an ISO standard), it is a lot harder to implement such principles onto real world objects analysis. According to this assessment, and to the need of going from theoretical to practical aspects, the paper is structured in three parts: the first offers a theoretical base that makes available, even for non-experts, the tools for addressing more operational aspects; the second describes, through practical examples, both the knowledge representation model and the software tool used for analysing a class of materials, the Etruscan urns, as shown in the third part. The final objective is, therefore, to provide a point of reference for facilitating the approach towards KM (Knowledge Management) and help clarifying the key elements of a discipline that is obtaining a growing success but, so far, still showing a high level of entropy.

Classification represents a central topic in archaeological research. In fact, archaeologists seem to spend a great deal of their time in describing and sorting materials, from surveys and excavations, in groups which should serve various ends. In the history of archaeological classification, briefly outlined in the first part of the paper, there has been an endless debate between the researchers following the traditional /qualitative/subjective approach and the proponente of a “new” (now forty years old) paradigm, founded on the formal/quantitative/objective idiom. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that none of them is at all satisfactory. In fact the traditional approach, despite the empirical validity, has proven very difficult to be formalized; the quantitative approach on the other hand, though being based on sound scientific principles, has presented serious difficulties in its practical applications. The article describes an attempt to implement an informatic tool able to produce formal analyses based on both qualitative and quantitative variables: an intelligent ObjectOriented system with classificatory purposes. The system, called Mosaico, is thoroughly illustrated in the second part of the article. The description concerns all the components of Mosaico, a language for conceptual modelling called TQL++ (Type and Query Language), and a brief explanation of some terms useful for a better understanding of the matter. A working example on the Fibulae from the Quattro Fontanili cemetery concludes the paper.