GeoSemantic technologies for Archaeological Research

Abstract

Over past decades, research into semantic technologies has been undertaken across a wide range of domains from the 'hard' sciences through to social sciences including humanities. Within the humanities, the subdomain of 'digital humanities' has emerged with a specific focus on the use of digital technologies, including semantic technologies, as a means of making sense of heterogeneous information resources and complex, often conflicting and incomplete, data. This has led to the development of formal descriptive models, 'ontologies', for describing information both within and across domains; with their roots in both computer science and philosophy, these models are central to approaches to information and knowledge creation including Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS) and Knowledge Engineering (KE) with a strong emphasis on graph structures. More recently, ontologies have been used to describe the spatio-temporal nature of information.