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Archaeologists regularly deal with large and diverse data sets, which are frequently the only record of excavated and destroyed archaeological sites. They need digital research infrastructures to preserve and provide access to this fragile digital data and to develop tools to manipulate and analyse it. Digital data is also increasing in quantity and size, and is often born digital, but there is a high degree of fragmentation and difficulty of accessing data in an integrated way. There is a small but growing number of national disciplinespecific research infrastructures, and there have been a few project based attempts to provide European exemplars. This paper describes ARIADNE, a new research infrastructure for archaeologists, funded by the European Commission. It discusses some of the major issues and challenges and introduces some of the activities that ARIADNE partners will undertake. Given the transnational nature of many archaeological research questions, there is a clear valueadded for organising research infrastructures in archaeology at a European level.

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The present paper concerns the design of the semantic infrastructure of the data space for cultural heritage as envisaged by the European Commission in its recent documents. Due to the complexity of the cultural heritage data and of their intrinsic inter-relationships, it is necessary to introduce a novel ontology, yet compliant with existing standards and interoperable with previous platforms used in this context as Europeana. The data space organization must be tailored to the methods and the theory of cultural heritage, briefly summarized in the introduction. The new ontology is based on the Digital Twin concept, i.e., the digital counterpart of cultural heritage assets incorporating all the digital information pertaining to them. This creates a Knowledge Base on the cultural heritage data space. The paper outlines the main features of the proposed Heritage Digital Twin ontology and provides some examples of its application. Future work will include completing the ontology in all its details and testing it in other real cases and with the various sectors of the cultural heritage community.

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.