An ontological application for archaeological narratives

Abstract

The CIPHER project was set up in April 2002 as a thirty month project supported by the European Union. The project aims to give the public new ways of accessing cultural heritage information from around Europe using new technologies. These technologies are intended to help organise knowledge and cultural heritage narratives. The technology helps to present these narratives on the internet and provides editing, communication and discussion tools. Visitors are able to customise and add to these narratives using tools provided by the partners. This paper is concerned with the development of the Irish Cultural Heritage Forum -explorer.ie. This forum was developed by The Dublin Institute of Technology and The Discovery Programme and gives online access to a database of Irish archaeology held by the Discovery Programme . This includes the complete National Monuments Record (NMR). The NMR is a list of categorised and detailed monument data for Ireland and Northern Ireland showing, for example, a monument's geographical position. Importantly the forum provides access to a large set of 'lessons' explaining and putting into context these monuments and artefacts. These lessons are primarily short texts which explain some aspect of Irish archaeology. The CH forum uses knowledge management techniques developed by the CIPHER partners including a specially adapted ontology of archaeological objects and concepts. This paper describes the process of adapting the Archaeological Monuments and Objects ontology developed by English Heritage to the objects in the Irish NMR. It describes how the FISH data standardization effort was used to guide this process and how the resulting ontology complies with the MIDAS collections guidelines.The paper outlines the architecture of the prototype application which allows authors and ordinary users of the site to relate their own lessons to this ontology and in this way to construct a broad ranging but structured description of the domain of Irish archaeology.

Use-Oriented Information and Knowledge Management: Information Production and Use Practices as an Element of the Value and Impact of Information

“…Using the terminology of Cook and Brown (1999), the systems tend to be built on the premises of the 'epistemology of possession' rather than the 'epistemology of practice' (Cook & Brown, 1999), or more broadly, on social forms of knowledge and knowing (exceptions e.g. Braccini & Federici, 2010;Engel & Grossner, 2016;Huvila, 2012;Kilfeather et al, 2003). Information is considered as a thing to have rather than something that people do (Newell et al, 2009).…”

Language, Culture, Computation. Computing of the Humanities, Law, and Narratives

“…Harrel (2006Harrel ( , 2007 [30] [31]has developed GRIOT whose purpose is to generate interactive multimedia events, and its main component is a novel algorithm called Alloy, which generates new conceptual structures by integrating other conceptual structures, based on recent research in cognitive linguistics, computer science, and semiotics; in particular. Kilfeather and McAuley (2003) [32] describe their attempt to develop tools which would facilitate a meaningful story or narrative structure to be developed from existing or newly created contents. They used a customized annotation system to support the construction of personal or shared spaces.…”