In the 48 months of the project (January 2019 – December 2022) ARIADNEplus has pursued its objective of “Extending and Focusing ARIADNE” in the creation of an integrated research infrastructure for archaeological data in Europe and beyond. A large number of new partners have been added to the previous consortium, including four from outside Europe, and all of them are now at the same level of awareness and competence in dataset integration. This is bringing a substantial extension in geographic coverage – the project now covers all of Europe, USA, Japan, Argentina and Israel – and in thematic coverage, with the project scope now covering all stages of human presence and all the topics pertaining to the archaeological domain, from excavation records to archaeological sciences. Seventeen new institutions and projects from outside the Consortium have shown interest to participate, among others the ROCEEH project on palaeoanthropology (
https://www.hadw-bw.de/en/research/research-center/roceeh/home(opens in new window)). The collaboration with international organizations – such as European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) and the European Archaeological Council (EAC) – has been strengthened, and the project now participates in important initiatives on data openness and FAIRification. A sister COST Action called SEADDA complements the networking activity.
Achieving this important result has required a large effort in networking and communication, the latter being based on the project web site www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu the Twitter account, and a newsletter. Training has also been addressed with some events held in person. Also attendance at major events as EAA and CAA conferences reverted from virtual to in person.
The ARIADNE Catalogue, which was developed during the first ARIADNE project, has been transformed with advanced search functionalities and services to use and re-use data. Innovative vocabulary mapping techniques have brought interoperability to a huge and heterogeneous collection of texts, drawings, images, videos, 3D models and maps. The procedures for updating and extending the ARIADNEplus infrastructure have been improved, and a clear pipeline has been defined, making excellent progress in aggregating partner datasets.
Since M36, the infrastructure has been extended to accommodate new ARIADNE subject types, demonstrating the powerful benefits for researchers in being able to cross-search multiple datasets, of different data types, from different data providers. The project now has c.400 million triples in the public knowledge base and c.3.5 million records in the public portal. The development of Application Profiles for specific subdomains has gone far beyond the expectations framed at the beginning of the project. Indeed, the development process of the application profiles and their systematisation as part of the general ARIADNE ontological framework have not only allowed the efficient and complete representation of the entire ARIADNE information ecosystem, but have also greatly contributed to the advancement of research in the field of the development of ontologies and conceptual models for cultural heritage.
The pilots have been launched and VREs have been linked to them. The latest VRE developed is the ARIADNEplus Lab which gives researchers access to a suite of tools that allow them to directly interrogate the ARIADNEplus Knowledge Base.
