Archaeology and Architecture in Europeana
Lund, 20th June 2018
Connecting archaeology and
architecture data: updating the
CARARE metadata schema
Kate Fernie, 2Culture Associates
Dimitris Gavrilis and Christos
Papatheodorou, Athena Research Centre

Archaeology and architecture
Archaeological monuments and historic buildings are complex,
multi-layered objects with dynamic lives.

Wealth of (digital) information objects
• Tangible heritage - monuments, buildings, landscapes,
artefacts, building components
• texts, plans, images, sketches, notes, 3D scans, scientific data,
catalogues, inventories, analyses
• Excavation and survey reports, conservation status, etc.
• Intangible heritage - histories, folk memories, traditional
skills, social significance
• narratives, diaries, news papers, media broadcasts
• Reference resources – gazetteers, vocabularies

The emerging digital heritage landscape
• Going beyond metadata for individual objects
• Making associations with places, people, events and
objects
• Integrating information sources
• Providing for interpretation, narrative and storytelling

CARARE metadata

CARARE metadata schema
Background
• Began life in 2010 as a schema designed to enable
harvesting of metadata from multiple archaeological and
architectural heritage archives for aggregation in
Europeana
• The schema is based on CIDOC core standards, MIDAS
Heritage and LIDO and is compatible with CIDOC CRM and
the Europeana Data Model
• Extended in 2012 to increase the support for 3D
http://pro.carare.eu/doku.php?id=metadata

Uses of the CARARE metadata schema
The uses of the schema includes:
• An intermediary to support cross-walks between native
metadata schemes in national language and a standard
format
• An XML export format from databases and repositories
• A data capture format for databases and digital libraries
Interest from developers in using the schema is increasing

Developing version 3
We asked ourselves:
• What would make the schema easier for our data
partners?
• What would make the schema more friendly to the needs
of developers?
• How can we support connections better?

Updating the schema: data partner perspective
CARARE
Collection
information
Heritage
asset
Digital
resource
Activity
*
*
• Considered use cases
• for museum objects, monuments,
buildings, 3D models and shipwrecks
• analysing the use of elements (whether
they need to be mandatory, optional or
repeatable, or linked to controlled
vocabularies) for each case
• Considered duplication/redundancy,
e.g. in the record information

Updating the schema: Europeana perspective
• Reviewed the mapping of
CARARE to EDM
• Analysed the use of
elements
• Support for Linked Data
within the CARARE
schema

Aims
• Next generation of the schema
• Compatible with previous versions
• Improved structure and documentation
• Adaptable for implementation in specific use cases, e.g. for
documentation
• Improved connections between objects and support for the
semantic web

Design challenges & considerations
• The CARARE metadata schema was designed originally
as a metadata harvesting protocol, to mediate between
different native schemas and aggregate data with minimal
information loss
• It had a nested structure (of elements and classes) that
presented some challenges for implementation
• One of the considerations is to move towards a more
developer friendly (rdf oriented) schema
• reducing the nesting and
• Increasing the support for linked data

Methodology for the development
Current status
• Initial evaluation and
analysis has been
completed
• Version 3 exists in draft form
• XSD is available in draft
• Now prototyping
Evaluation
Use case analysis
Drafting schema & XSD
Prototyping (in systems)
Finalising
RDFJSON

Prototyping
• Athena Research Centre is currently prototyping the schema
using Semantic Omeka, this will:
• Help to evaluate version 3 of the CARARE schema in one of
the use case (for documentation and data capture)
• Support a need expressed by the CARARE user community

Next steps
• More prototyping
• Testing and evaluation of the results
• Finalising the development
• Enabling the use cases
• Implementing support for the user community

Thanks for your attention
kfernie27@gmail.com
d.gavrilis@dcu.gr