Ontologies are highly flexible tools that use hierarchies of classes, properties, and individuals to organise and connect concepts, making them understandable to both humans and machines. They enable the representation of domain-specific knowledge while ensuring interoperability through the use of standardised vocabularies.
This approach holds considerable potential for several areas of archaeology, particularly ceramic studies, where the diversity of data recording and management practices still poses significant challenges for the effective comparison, sharing, and reuse of research data. Moreover, reasoning engines can generate new inferred knowledge and automatically classify information according to the classes defined within the ontology.
Modelling the ontology schema and mapping tabular data to RDF/OWL constituted one of the major milestones of the project in 2024. This achievement was made possible through the use of Protégé, a free and open-source software platform widely used for ontology development and management.
SPARQL queries enable the exploration of the dataset and the retrieval of a wide range of information. For example, they can provide quantitative data on specific classes of artefacts, helping to assess the volume of ceramic imports, their spatial and chronological distribution, and changes in their relative proportions across archaeological contexts.
Bibliography
- Van Helden, D., Hong, Y. and Allison, P. 2018. "Building an Ontology of Tablewares using Legacy Data", Internet Archaeology, 50. https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue50/13/1.html