Pottery data sets from Jerash, Jordan within the Mediterranean frame

Submitted by Annette Højen Sørensen, Aarhus University, Denmark

The Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project was initiated in 2011 by Prof. R. Raja from Aarhus University, Denmark and Prof. A. Lichtenberger from Bochum University,  Germany and is a transnational project which includes several scholars of various  disciplines.

The finds of the excavation spans the periods from the Bronze Age until the late Medieval period within the pottery repertoire with a strong emphasis on the Roman, Byzantine and  Umayyad periods. The terminologies chosen for the registration and in particular in the  project database thus has to bridge many periods in terms of wares, shapes, decorative  patterns and chronological periods and has to reflect the terminologies in use for the  pottery throughout these periods in the Eastern Mediterranean region. The need for  standards in pottery descriptions has been dealt with in the discussions surrounding the  beginning of the excavations and again during the development of the database which will be in function in January 2015. The round table discussion about global standards  within the pottery research and the dissemination process of excavation results is thus a  good opportunity to discuss and develop future standards. With the divers pottery  repertoire in Jerash Jordan at hand the project will be able to feed in to and benefit from  structured linked data sets using a set of global standards.

Linked Samian Ware: challenges of a LOD approach to samian ware

Submitted by Florian Thiery

Research in samian ware advanced considerably in recent years based on a dataset collected by several scholars in the past decades [1]. It comprises detailed and reviewed data of potters, pots and related places in the northern provinces of the Roman Empire. The spatial distribution and chronological pattern as well as the identification of kiln sites of individual potters are key research questions. Based on this data, for instance Mees proposed a reconstruction and analysis of pottery trade networks considering archaeological material [2]. The nature of the data makes it reasonable to approach the questions utilizing the concept of Linked Open Data (LOD) to generate interoperability and potential for data dissemination.

The goal of the study presented in this presentation is to migrate a subset of these data into a LOD structure and to make it accessible through URIs in a REST interface as well as via a SPARQL endpoint. The subjective semantic relations between potters, pots and places should be visualised in the manner of linking. Furthermore the resources should be linked to existing LOD projects, for instance to Pleiades [3] for places, using the Semantic Web to get additional information for the own resource.

Potter, pots and places and their attributes could be conceptually modelled using the CIDOC-CRM [4]. However, in the study direct linking of individual objects to mature ontologies widely used in the Semantic Web was preferred, to avoid CIDOC-CRM modelling questions. This presentation shows different modelling concepts and its challenges for each resource type using (1) an own ontology, (2) existing ontologies in the web, (3) the approach of Kerameikos [5] as well as (4) labels of the Labeling System [6]. The semantic links between potters, pots and places could be build via an own fixed predicate ontology or using ontologies like SKOS [7] or Open Annotation [8] to generate loose coupled relations.

The idea of LOD is to couple related resources to build up an interlinked web of data. In the context of the study it was investigated what kind of suitable web resources are available from which the samian ware resources could benefit. On the one hand, web accessible repositories for fragments and potters are missing.

On the other hand, Pleiades provides a large number of places to support geographical annotations of textural sources or archaeological objects. These places are used by the Pelagios project [9] that links data from more than 20 partners to get additional information to an abstract Pleiades place concept. In this study, find-spots and kiln sites are mapped to Pleiades places to get additional data from the Pelagios partners. The locations in the samian dataset are reviewed and show much higher precision than the Pleiades places, so this mapping challenge have to be solved, too.

The results yield that research on samian ware can benefit from implementing the concept of LOD. Enhanced perspectives arise when extending the linked data to other resources like dies and coins. When the data is published it could contribute to cross-linking of archaeological information internationally. A major challenge is finding the correct modelling concept for each resource type, as well as the semantic links between each other and to relying resources in the Semantic Web. Using technologies like the Labeling System, CIDOC-CRM, SKOS and Open Annotation can help to overcome this bottleneck.

The presentation presents the results of a M.Sc. thesis delivered at the Hochschule Mainz - University of Applied Sciences in cooperation with the Römisch Germanisches Zentralmuseum Mainz (RGZM) and the Institute for Spatial Information and Surveying Technology (i3mainz) [10].

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References

1. http://www.rgzm.de/samian
2. Mees, A. (2011): Die Verbreitung von Terra Sigillata aus den Manufakturen von Arezzo, Pisa, Lyon, und La Graufesenque: Die Transformation der italischen Sigillata-Herstellung in Gallien 1. Auflage, Verlag des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums, 2011.
3. http://pleiades.stoa.org
4. http://cidoc-crm.org
5. http://kerameikos.org
6. http://i3mainz.hs-mainz.de/en/projekte/labelingsystem
7. http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-skos-reference-20090818
8. http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core
9. http://pelagios-project.blogspot.de
10. http://www.hs-mainz.de – http://rgzm.de – http://i3mainz.hs-mainz.de

CAA Siena Roundtable Update

Since it is not possible to submit an abstract through the CAA conference paper submission system for the Linked Open Data Applied to Pottery Databases roundtable, as it was last year with the numismatic roundtable in Paris, one can email the abstract to Tyler Jo Smith or me directly. Additionally, in order to promote the proposals and discussion topics, I can give access to participants to post their ideas and abstracts here on the Kerameikos blog.

Even if you do not plan to make a short, 10-15 minute informal presentation during the roundtable, you may still post the topics you'd like to discuss, your interests in pottery and/or databases, or what information you'd like to come away with. This format is similar to THATCamp. For the roundtable to be optimally beneficial, the participants should have an influence on the conversation. After all, the roundtable isn't just about the Kerameikos project.

CAA 2015 Roundtable: Linked Data for Pottery

The Kerameikos.org steering committee has submitted the following roundtable proposal for CAA 2015, to be held in Siena, Italy between March 30 and April 3. The roundtable was recently accepted. Please see the call for papers. Below is the abstract:

Linked Open Data Applied to Pottery Databases

The indestructible nature of pottery has left an abundant amount of material in the archaeological record. Vessels were formed into a variety of shapes and sizes which inform the modern scholar about their possible function and/or manufacturing process. In addition to being an excellent tool for dating, pottery also enables researchers to reconstruct the nature of a site and/or point to evidence of trade between groups of people. Some types of pottery even exhibit additional decoration that reflects the style of a certain period, the visual language of a region, or scenes that offer information about religion, daily life, literature, or contemporary events.

Ceramics exist in a variety of databases within museum collections, archives, or as part of excavations or surveys. The basic ideas underlying the classification of ancient Mediterranean pottery (e.g., shape, production place, painter, potter, iconography, etc.) are shared across languages, but the aggregation of data on a massive scale cannot be undertaken without standardised identifiers and ontologies. Presently, there are no firm standards for representing and/or publishing pottery datasets on the web, and, for this reason, it is difficult to query across multiple collections for research purposes. Linked Open Data (LOD) can play a vital role in ameliorating some of these technical challenges. Building on the methodologies developed for Nomisma.org, a collaborative enterprise that seeks to define the intellectual concepts of numismatics, we have undertaken a new project, Kerameikos.org, that likewise will apply these technologies to pottery. Kerameikos.org, a thesaurus that seeks to define pottery concepts with URIs and RDF, will enable those publishing ceramic data to encode their information in an accessible manner, following emerging web standards in the cultural heritage community.

This roundtable follows the introduction of Kerameikos.org during the 2014 CAA (Gruber and Smith). Since that time we have selected a Scientific Committee comprised of experts relevant to the current project content, including information technologists and pottery specialists. Currently, we seek to solicit feedback from the informatics and ceramics communities on our future direction. While Kerameikos.org is focused currently on Greek black- and red-figure ‘vases’, we welcome presentations and discussions of digital projects in other fields of pottery studies. It is our goal to design a tool whose application can meet the needs of archaeologists working in museums, the field, or archives. We hope that this roundtable will encourage further dialogue and collaboration.

Ethan Gruber, American Numismatic Society
Renee Gondek, George Washington University
Tyler Jo Smith, University of Virginia