D5.18 Report on the archaeological case study

In SSHOC Task 5.7 (Open Linked Data. Archaeology Case Study), a virtual reconstruction of the Roman theatre in Catania has been created as a case study for the transition of archaeological data to the cloud, i.e. from data silos on individual computers to webservices. The case study is based on a unified workflow that starts with the archaeological documentation and results in a virtual reconstruction. With this workflow, data manually acquired during an excavation and traditionally stored on paper can now be stored in the cloud and used for 3D visualisations of the site.

Part of the data for the Roman theatre comes from earlier projects, where it was transferred from proprietary formats to open formats and open systems, and part of the data has been created in this task. This represents a useful exemplar of using both new and legacy data in a single project.

The workflow uses tools that have been developed by the task partners, in particular the Extended Matrix for 3D reconstruction. The task partners have documented the existing systems and their individual workflows and applied them to existing as well as newly created data on the Roman theatre.

The case study also relies on systems for normative data for place and time information, and based on the case study the task partners have evaluated additional data standardisation strategies to enable data sharing and re-use of archaeological data. To this end, the underlying data models have been aligned with CIDOC CRM. In addition, the 4D virtualisation has been embedded in a Linked Open Data scenario, which creates several entry points for examining, comparing and searching the 3D model.