Presentation of the Conference.

Introduction to the Conference.

Thanks to the world wide web, we now have at our disposal a huge mass of information and a large number of research tools on line. But what we do need is to put all these resources together in order to transform accessible data into real knowledge.

The Italian Research and Education Network, known as GARR, has a long tradition of supporting institutions for the protection and promotion of cultural heritage. GARR provides the community of its users with an advanced network infrastructure and innovative tools for international collaboration with universities and research institutes, for transmitting and sharing large amounts of data, and for the use of web applications such as virtual museums, virtual archaeology, and geographic information systems. In recent years, the use of the network in the cultural heritage sector has grown significantly. Besides connectivity, GARR has created a cloud infrastructure for computing and storage of great amounts of data. This infrastructure has been designed with a federated approach in order to encourage the sharing of resources within the academic and research sectors. The availability of optic fiber connections in several cultural heritage sites has given GARR the opportunity to extend the benefits of network technology also to performing arts professionals. An example of this collaboration is the theatre play Innovating Colosseum, a geographically distributed performance to celebrate the inauguration of the new GARR connection of several sites of the Superintendence for the Colosseum and the archeological area of central Rome.

For networking, i.e. for the circulation and exchange of data on the cultural heritage, it is necessary to share rules and descriptive systems, placing them within a common perspective; it is necessary, in fact, to find a meeting point between the needs of those who produce the data and those who use them. Within the framework of standards for cataloguing defined by the Italian Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation (ICCD), the tools for the description and documentation of the archaeological heritage constitute a very structured corpus, a coherent system which helps computerized management that allows the integration of different cognitive components. As far as networking is concerned, the Institute has actively participated in the realization of both the project VIR - Vincoli in rete, to implement a platform for interoperability between the major databases of MiBACT (SIGECweb, Carta del Rischio and Beni Tutelati), and the European project ARIADNE, an infrastructure for sharing resources concerning archaeology, for scientific and study purposes. In addition, the ICCD set up a web site for the public use of the Catalogo generale dei beni culturali and a dedicated web area, namely Open ICCD, for the dissemination in open format of different types of cataloguing data.

The paper is about recent national and European legislation on data re-use. It argues that the time has come to realize that Open Access and copyright ought not to oppose each other. They should instead find ways to balance each other. Open Access is necessary for government-sponsored data. The industrial and creative industry cannot simply give up copyright; it must keep it in order to survive on the market. On the other hand, the industrial and creative industry ought to be allowed to make use of government-sponsored data. Legislation is on the way.

The co-operative model is a key concept of ICCU’s cultural policy. The Institute is responsible for some of the most important national infrastructures for accessing heritage and documentation of the Italian libraries, and over the years it has adopted an increasingly open data policy to facilitate the use and reuse of digital cultural heritage on an international scale. ICCU has a profound expertise in digitisation standards and guidelines; it manages the National Library Service, the union catalogue of over 6,000 Italian libraries and it coordinates, on behalf of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage Activities and Tourism, major digital cultural heritage projects at a national level such as Internet Culturale, the portal of the digital resources of Italy’s libraries, and CulturaItalia, the national aggregator for Europeana. ICCU also manages MuseiD-Italia, the digital library of the Italian museums, integrated in CulturaItalia portal. ICCU participates in many international initiatives for strengthening the cohesion of research and technical and semantic interoperability in the sector of cultural heritage, humanities, history and linguistic studies in order to create a digital ecosystem and effective e-infrastructures that can offer innovative tools and services able to exploit synergies and cooperative workflows in these related domains. The paper presents the main projects and activities carried out by ICCU at national and international levels that are investigating political and technical issues of the relation between the DCH sector and research infrastructures.

By introducing the second session of the SITAR Conference, the Author focuses on the importance of the issue relevant to the virtuous balance between content dissemination and compliance with the existing technical and legal rules or administrative guidelines on data opening process.

Recently, some fundamental updates of the Italian legislative framework clarified the topics of public access to and dissemination of data held by public administrations. Specifically, three legislative decrees broadened the scope of the existing laws and regulations to 1) allow public and private users to access more easily public data, 2) stimulate public administrations to better improve their data delivery systems, and 3) activate both new freely and pay-per-download data provisioning procedures, for the benefit of both public and private users. In this evolving scenario, during the last ten years the SITAR Project demonstrated that for the Public Archaeology of Rome and its broad territory it is necessary to 1) achieve a total accessibility of scientific data, also through participative processes and tools allowing ubiquitous access to and real integration, and consequently, validation of information; 2) engage in this participation all users involved in data and knowledge (re-)production and sharing, from scientists and scholars, to public administrators and officers, up to professionals as well as members of the public and all other stakeholders. In this paper, the authors deal with the newly designed SITAR Project data licensing policy illustrating the legal bases on what the SITAR administrative procedures are being implemented and experimented about data openness and their public access and use. The authors also try to offer a contribution to the long cultural debate of these last decades about interrelationships between scientific research and administrative actions of public bodies, public access to data and legal reservations, creativity in archaeology and copyright-copyleft of scientific data produced by public administrations and/or professionals on behalf of the former.

In most cases, cultural heritage refers to creative works whose copyright has expired a long time ago or even never existed. This situation can give the impression that those cultural assets are undoubtedly in the public domain and there are no restrictions for their reproduction. This paper, based solely on Italian law, tries to show, on the one hand, that their public domain status is still partial due to a distorted and manipulative use of so-called intellectual property; on the other hand, it demonstrates that there are far more incisive constraints arising from administrative law and an entrenched bureaucratic and contractual practice which is contrary to a free and unconditional reproducibility of the cultural heritage. The paper explores the most common tricks used to ward off the danger of the public domain and presents the legal instruments required to make these cultural assets and resources really open. Furthermore, this paper offers a comment, based on a critical approach, about the most relevant rules provided by the Italian legal system for this legal and cultural subject.

The subject of the access and free reuse of cultural data is one of the more topical challenges in the modern democracy of the knowledge. The full affirmation of this principle, still finding today however several cultural obstacles both on a cultural and a regulatory point of view, would allow to rethink toward more including forms the public administration’s approach to cultural heritage. This paper focuses on the request, advanced by the movement Fotografie libere per i Beni Culturali to extend the free photography for research purposes to public archives and libraries, lately fulfilled by the law n. 124/2017 which entered into force on the 29th of August. Great opportunities may instead be presented by the adoption of licenses by museums, archives, and libraries, allowing free commercial reuse of digitization, as well as that panorama freedom today still denied in Italy. The paper concludes by examining another category of cultural data, namely documentation related to the archaeological excavations preserved in the MiBACT archives: free access to this type of data could encourage not only archaeological research, but also more efficient conservation and promotional activities.

In this report, the Author focuses on the SITAR Conference session devoted to good practices for developing open data, open knowledge, and open science in archaeology. A concise account of the most accredited national and international policies and actions to promote the open science movement introduces some comments on future research and publishing perspectives.

In its four years of activity the ARIADNE project has created a catalogue of European digital archives which offers a portal that makes it possible to search the repository, where about two million datasets are recorded. The project has implemented an Open Data system applying the FAIR principles (Findable-Accessible-Interoperable-Reusable), and making available a concrete re-use of these important information sources, which otherwise would be difficult to access as most of the contents are unpublished.

In this short essay, the Author reflects on what the prospects were for the Technical Tables for the coordination and integration of the National Archaeological Territorial Information System at different spatial scales, and the subsequent outcomes. This leads the Author to critically analyze the role of technology and induces him to think about a change in the point of view and to focus on a new perspective.

The collaboration between the SITAR and SITAVR projects, started in 2013, has continued thanks to a shared process of consolidation including: the conceptual model (GeoUML), the metadata, the documentation of the physical database and the publishing of data in XML format. The work also continued with a study on modelling and managing the time dimension in the context of archaeological databases and an experiment aiming to use the developed methodology and tools on a small town, Isola della Scala, in the province of Verona as part of the SITAIS project. Given the availability of three autonomous systems for three different territories linked by a single conceptual model, it was possible to test interoperability between the three implemented systems. The first experiment was developed by navigating an XML complex schema, where all the catalogued objects and associations between them were represented. A Web Feature Service was implemented for accessing data and a web application is currently being developed to allow users to query, navigate data and interrogate the three systems at once. A second experiment involved the generation of an XML simplified schema, where data are accessible on a single and flat form. Again, a Web Feature Service was implemented and a common GIS software was used to visualize the data provided by this service. The sharing of a conceptual model and vocabularies proved to be a winning approach for archaeological research and for the future interoperability between systems.

ARCHIVE MAME is a digitization and cataloging project of the archivistic collection at the National Museum of the Middle Ages (MAME) in Rome. This project was possible thanks to an agreement signed in 2015 between the Museum and the National Research Council (CNR). Established in 1967, the National Museum of the Middle Ages preserves and exhibits materials dating from the fourth and the fourteenth century coming mainly from the city of Rome and from the central areas of Italy. Among its finds there is an excellent group of finds from the two most important Longobard necropolises in central Italy, Nocera Umbra and Castel Trosino. It is composed of weapons kits, jewelry, ivory, glass and bronze vessels and ceramics. The archive consists of repertory records and models following the history and the evolution of archaeological objects and pieces in the collection.

This paper presents the proceedings of the SITAR III edition, held in 2013. Two previous conferences have been held, the first in 2010 and the second in 2011 and proceedings of both have been published, thus offering an example of continuity and assiduity in their cultural and scientific involvement. This third volume shows how the experience has evolved, how it has spread, and its main features, in comparison with other similar initiatives. The volume is composed of seven parts and contains 33 articles, but only a few of the papers are mentioned here. Essentially, the second section on the spread of the SITAR model, the seventh section, and the last section are considered, choosing some of the cases developed within the SITAR itself. Summing up, some general considerations concerning three indispensable goals to be achieved in the future are cited: the rooting of the territorial laboratory in the structure of the Superintendence, the construction of the digital heritage; the contextual vision of cultural heritage.

Sharing and communicating archaeological knowledge and heritage as a whole has been, and still is, one of the main points of strength of SITAR. It is possible to argue that this goal has been achieved not just thanks to technological tools but by moving from a cultural premise based on a prevalent contextual concept of archaeology and cultural communication.