1. The ARIADNE project
Franco Niccolucci
PIN
Project Coordinator
ARIADNE is funded by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme

2. What is ARIADNE
• ARIADNE is a EU-funded project aimed at integrating
the European Research Infrastructures on
archaeological datasets
• Its overall goal is to overcome the fragmentation of
archaeological data repositories and to foster a
culture of data sharing and re-using
• ARIADNE is managed by a partnership joining the
excellence of European archaeology and technology,
and is open to the collaboration of researchers,
professionals and institutions from anywhere in
Europe and abroad

3. Why ARIADNE
The “data deluge”
Percentage of archaeological
projects in dataset size groups
“Average” size of project datasets

4. Why ARIADNE
Willingness to share, use and re-use
•400.000 downloads from the Archaeological Data
Service (ADS) repository of ”grey” literature
(unpublished archaeological reports) in 6 years
(5.500/month)
•45.000 downloads from ADS in three months in 2010
(15.000/month)
•94% of respondents to a SAA survey state they would
use electronic data more, if they were accessible
•ARACHNE visits: 82.000 in 2010, 140.000 in 2011
• Open Access for Science initiative

5. Why ARIADNE
Need of integration
•Go beyond academic ARACNE:
or administrative ADS: 18.000 grey
500.000+ images
250.000 objects
borders literature reports
1.100.000 records
•Integrate datasets
overlapping in scope
GALLICA: several
•Access unpublished thousand reports
information SIGECweb:
270.000 records FASTI online:
(archaeology) 12.000 reports

6. How to achieve integration
Data sharing requires
•Suitability of somebody else’s data for one’s
purposes
•Interoperability of datasets
•Trusting in data collected by others
•Guarantee of data “provenance”

7. What is interoperabilty
What do interoperability and provenance mean?
•Interoperability: capability of different information
systems to communicate
•Syntactic interoperability: communicate on the
symbolic level, resolving differences in encodings and
representation
– Technical and social problem
•Semantic interoperability: communicate with shared
meanings
– Intellectual and research question
•Digital Provenance: which (additional) data must be
stored to make data trustworthy

8. The ARIADNE partnership
• Coordination
– PIN
– UoY-ADS

9. Project activities
• Networking activities
– Community building
– Standardization and good practices
• Trans-National Access to shared datasets and
training in their creation, as well as to on-line
repositiories
• Research activities
– Knowledge organization
– Data management
– New or improved tools to extract information

10. What we hope to achieve
• By achieving the project objectives we aim at
giving answers to three grand challenges:
– A social challenge, concerning the community of
archaeologists
– A technological challenge, addressing
improvements in the current use of ICT
– A scientific challenge, re-shaping concepts both
from the IT domain and the archaeological
method

11. The grand challenges: social
• Identify and shape a community of science,
formed by institutions, researchers and
professionals from inside and outside the
project
• Understand and make explicit their needs,
wishes and dreams
• Outline a roadmap for now and for
tomorrow
• Provide answers to their requests

12. The grand challenges: technological
• Set up a satisfactory level of interoperability
• Provide services that build practical use on it
• Make using and re-using data a common
practice in archaeological research, as it is
today browsing bibliographical references

13. The grand challenges: scientific
• Understand how knowledge organization
must be improved to make technological
advance possible and suitable
• Explore new avenues for making the best out
of accumulated knowledge
• Move towards a paradigm shift in the use of
a digital framework, and make it a
substantial component of the archaeological
methodology

14. ARIADNE is a project funded by the European Commission
under the Community’s Seventh Framework Programme,
contract no. FP7-INFRASTRUCTURES-2012-1-313193.
The views and opinions expressed in this presentation are the
sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect
the views of the European Commission.