Conference: Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archeology

Yesterday I went to the CAA 2012 conference in Southampton, one of the top conferences in the world in the field of computational archaeology. I couldn't stay for longer than a day, but I saw enough to say that archaeologists definitely know their way around when it comes to combining IT with their discipline.

I presented a poster about the Art of Making project (which deals with categorizing and making available online a collection of images of ancient Roman sculpture). In particular, I was there for the Data Modelling and Sharing session: the formal ontology we're working on in the Art of Making (and the accompanying dataset) is likely going to become one of the first of its kind. So I was quite interested in finding out who's doing what when it comes to sharing data about the ancient world.

The answer is: there are a lot of people doing very interesting things (by the way, please get in touch if you know of other related datasets). Here's a brief report on some of the papers that struck me (for the full list of the talks I would have liked to attend, check out my interactive schedule).

• A paper on the Pelagios project by Leif Isaksen. Pelagios is a consortium that brings together an impressive number of datasets on the ancient world. I'd say each of them is worth taking a look at: Arachne; CLAROS; Fasti Online; Google Ancient Places; Nomisma; Open Context; Perseus; Pleiades; Ptolemy Machine; SPQR; Ure Museum.

• A paper titled "When, What, Where, How and Who?" by Sarah May. She reported on a user study aimed at understanding how archaeologists search for information online, and whether a more integrated web of data would match their current information-seeking behaviors.

• The paper "Exploring Semantic Web-based research questions for the spatio-temporal relationships at Çatalhöyük" by Holly Wright. She presented an archaeological data-modeling scenario that calls for more powerful knowledge representation approaches to time and events. There are two broad approaches to solve this problem, she said: temporal reification (apparently this is mostly done using SWRL rules, e.g., here and here) and temporal fluents (some info here, and also in the context of the SOWL project). I don't know much about this topic, but this paper certainly got me interested in it!

• A paper presenting the SAWS project, which looks at defining and linking related units of text in original manuscripts using semantic web technologies.
• The Archaeology Data Services, a York-based organization that aims at 'preserving digital data in the long term, and promoting and disseminating a broad range of data in archaeology'. In particular, one of their projects, Stellar, has produced a number of software tools that facilitate the manipulation of archaeological data and their transformation into RDF-compliant formats.

Finally, this is the schedule for the whole conference (notice the slick widget—it's powered by a new service sched.org):