AHRC Funds STELLAR Project
February 9, 2010
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has announced its support (£110k) for a Glamorgan Hypermedia Research Unit project proposal, Semantic Technologies Enhancing Links and Linked data for Archaeological Resources (STELLAR). The project is in collaboration with co-investigators at York University Archaeology Department and English Heritage. Directed by Professor Douglas Tudhope (PI), STELLAR will build on outcomes and tools from the previous AHRC funded STAR project (£222k), which in its turn extended semantic search techniques initially developed through the EPSRC funded FACET project (£121k), a collaboration with the Science Museum.
The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) at York has a mandate to provide a digital repository for outputs from research funded by AHRC, NERC, English Heritage and other bodies. Archaeology has seen increasing use of the Web in recent years for data dissemination, and the ADS holds a wide range of datasets from archaeological excavations. However datasets and applications are currently fragmented and isolated. Different terminology and data organisation hinders search and comparison across datasets. Because of these impediments, archaeological data is rarely reused and re-examined in light of evolving research questions and interpretations.
The STAR project addressed these concerns by developing semantic and natural language processing techniques to link digital archive databases and the associated grey literature, via an overarching framework (the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, extended for archaeological purposes by English Heritage). STELLAR aims to generalise and extend the data extraction tools produced by STAR to facilitate their adoption by third party data providers. The extracted data will be represented in standard formats that allow the datasets to be cross searched and linked by a variety of Semantic Web tools, following a Linked Data approach.
