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Research e-infrastructures, digital archives and data services have become important pillars of scientific enterprise that in recent decades has become ever more collaborative, distributed and data-intensive. The archaeological research community has been an early adopter of digital tools for data acquisition, organisation, analysis and presentation of research results of individual projects. However, the provision of e-infrastructure and services for data sharing, discovery, access and (re-)use have lagged behind. This situation is being addressed by ARIADNE, the Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe. This EU-funded network has developed an e-infrastructure that enables data providers to register and provide access to their resources (datasets, collections) through the ARIADNE data portal, facilitating discovery, access and other services across the integrated resources. This paper describes the current landscape of data repositories and services for archaeologists in Europe, and the issues that make interoperability between them difficult to realise. The results of the ARIADNE surveys on users' expectations and requirements are also presented. The main section of the paper describes the architecture of the e-infrastructure, core services (data registration, discovery and access) and various other extant or experimental services. The ongoing evaluation of the data integration and services is also discussed. Finally, the paper summarises lessons learned, and outlines the prospects for the wider engagement of the archaeological research community in the sharing of data through ARIADNE.

The management of archaeological excavation data has been the subject of scientific debate in the last decades: critical elements have been identified, such as maintaining analytical data and the derived knowledge entangled, and other relevant aspects, like data curation, accessibility, and long-term preservation, have emerged. This study describes, illustrates, and evaluates the use of the Archaeological Interactive Report (AIR), a cutting-edge information system designed to manage excavation data that is oriented toward the 3D web semantics. AIR is a web platform for recording archaeological investigations live, an online archive that incorporates the complete dataset of the investigations, and a multimedia visualization system providing a 3D environment for data analysis and assemblages, testing interpretation hypotheses, and publishing dynamic editorialization outputs. AIR is applied and evaluated within the case study of Västra Vång (southeastern Sweden), demonstrating that it is possible to use a flexible ontological data model tailored to the archaeologists’ needs.

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