James,
A member of the ARCHCOMP-L discussion list forwarded your posting to
[log in to unmask], a U.K. based mailing list run by the Forum on
Information Standards in Heritage - FISH (see http://www.mda.org.uk/fish). I
think we may be able to help, though of course my comments below relate to
the U.K. situation rather than the USA.
You asked about artefact name, chronology and provenance standards to
support data interoperability. I recommend as a starting point the
INSCRIPTION terminology standard that you can find from the FISH homepage
(url above). More specifically:-
Artefacts:
The standard source in the UK is the Museums Documentation Association
thesaurus of archaeological object terms which is designed to assist
retrieval from museums collections systems, particularly those conforming to
the SPECTRUM museusm documentation standard (see their web-site at
http://www.mda.org.uk). mda are currently working on an XML DTD to support
interoperability of museums data which may also be helpful. The thesaurus
can be browsed online at http://www.rchme.gov.uk/thesaurus/thes_splash.htm
follow the 'Frequent User' link for a list of available thesauri.
Chronology:
FISH has recently been developing Timelines - a thesaurus of chronological
terminology for the sorts of use you envisage. At present this only includes
terminology, but we are hoping to add date-ranges to provide additional
indexing functions. The draft version is available for online browsing at If
you look at the archive of messages for this list for January 2000 - May
2000 you will be able to see some of the issues discussed (see
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/fish.html). The draft thesaurus is available
online for browsing at http://www.rchme.gov.uk/thesaurus/construction.htm .
Provenance:
Obviously the standard you want needs to cover the geographic areas that are
of relevance to your artefacts. The most relevant choice in this instance
that I'm aware of is the Thesaurus of Geographic Names from the Getty Trust
which has global coverage in some detail. See
http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/
A very moot point at this stage is standards for the interoperability of
thesaurus structures themselves. Again this is an area where the US seems to
have the edge at the moment - see the NKOS site at
http://alexandria.sdc.ucsb.edu/~lhill/nkos/ for a developing XML approach.
Alternatively in the UK I have recently heard about the LIMBER project which
is using RDF (sorry - I haven't got a url yet!).
Hope some of this helps in your project
Edmund Lee
FISH Coordinator
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Find out more about 'FISH'
the Forum on Information Standards in Heritage
at its homepage at www.mda.org.uk/fish or its
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