Athina Kritsotaki

According to its published mission, the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), the most recent flagship initiative of the European Commission currently being developed by the EU-funded project ECHOES, is “…a digital ecosystem designed to serve as a platform for cultural heritage professionals, researchers, and institutions across Europe… to unify Europe’s fragmented cultural heritage sector through advanced digital collaboration…”. While recognizing that “…one of the most persistent challenges in the European cultural heritage sector is the dispersion of data in incompatible formats and isolated institutional practices…”, the ECCCH advances “…a unified approach (that) will radically transform and greatly facilitate … collaborative research…”, promoting the engagement with small, peripheric Cultural Heritage (CH) institutions and providing (tangible and intangible) CH data under their custody. The article describes an experiment in assessing the usefulness of online accessible digital data on a specific type of CH objects, namely Cypriot Late Bronze Age figurines, for synthetic research on their socio-economic and cultural roles, as provided by CH institutions through their digital catalogues. Most of the ca. 170 figurines unearthed so far were found in Cyprus, where they were also produced. Out of these, ca. a third are hosted in museums in Cyprus, and the others are dispersed in some 36 museums, primarily in the UK, museums across ten EU countries, the USA and the Russian Federation. Less than half of them provide information on these figurines through their digital, open-access collections catalogue. The study reported here looked into the metadata of the museums’ online catalogues and their possibility to be expressed by the ECHOES’ CIDOC CRM-based ontology, as well as the relevance of the provided content for archaeological research. Finally, using freely available commercial AI models, the experiment preliminarily explored the relevance of their use in synthetic research based on museums’ data. The results have shown that museums’ online catalogues describing the Cypriot figurines examined are largely constrained by the Object ID documentation standard, conceived to identify and record cultural goods and created as a practical tool for facilitating the recovery of stolen cultural goods, providing limited information necessary for conducting archaeological research on them.

According to its published mission, the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), a most recent flagship initiative of the European Commission, cur-rently being developed by the EU-funded project ECHOES, is “…a digital ecosystem designed to serve as a platform for cultural heritage professionals, researchers, and in-stitutions across Europe… to unify Europe’s fragmented cultural heritage sector through advanced digital collaboration…”. While recognizing that “…one of the most persistent challenges in the European cultural heritage sector is the dispersion of data in incom-patible formats and isolated institutional practices…”, the ECCCH advances “…a unified approach (that) will radically transform and greatly facilitate … collaborative research…”, promoting the engagement with small, peripheric Cultural Heritage (CH) institutions and providing (tangible and intangible) CH data under their custody. The article describes an experiment in assessing the readiness of available digital data on a specific type of CH objects, namely Cypriot Late Bronze Age figurines. Most of the ca. 170 figurines un-earthed were found in Cyprus, where they were also produced. Out of these, ca. a third are hosted in museums in Cyprus, and the others are dispersed in some 36 museums, primarily in the UK, museums across ten EU countries, the USA and the Russian Fed-eration. Less than half of them provide, through their digital, open-access collections catalogue, information on these figurines. The study reported here investigated the usefulness of this information for conducting synthetic research on their nature and the socio-cultural role they may have fulfilled while in use in the past. Consequently, the study explored the potential of the information provided by these museums to be inte-grated and expressed through the Heritage Digital Twin concept, at the core of the ECCCH.

Food resource management plays a pivotal role in addressing global challenges related to food security, sustainability, public health, and economic development. To facilitate the collection and identification of food resources, various collections and systems have emerged from the scientific community. One such system is FoodEx2, which has been developed by the European Food Safety Authority and is used for classifying and describing food-related information. In this paper, we describe how FoodEx2 can be transformed into a standardized thesaurus using well-established technologies and standards that enhance its interoperability and exchange of data resources. The new thesaurus also promotes its usage through the adoption of unique and global identifiers for its contents and through a variety of tools that can be used for accessing and visualizing it. In addition, we describe how the thesaurus can be reconstructed from the original sources as they evolve.

We describe the construction and use of the SeaLiT Ontology, an extension of the ISO standard CIDOC-CRM for the modelling and integration of maritime history information. The ontology has been developed gradually, following a bottom-up approach that required the analysis of large amounts of real primary data (archival material) as well as knowledge and validation by domain experts (maritime historians). We present the specification of the ontology, RDFS and OWL implementations, as well as knowledge graphs that make use of this data model for integrating information originating from a large and diverse set of archival documents, such as crew lists, sailors registers, naval ship registers, and payrolls. We also describe an application that operates over these knowledge graphs and which supports historians in exploring and quantitatively analysing the integrated data through a user-friendly interface. Finally, we discuss aspects related to the use, evolution, and sustainability of the ontology.

We describe the construction and use of the SeaLiT Ontology, an extension of the ISO standard CIDOC-CRM for the modelling and integration of maritime history information. The ontology has been developed gradually, following a bottom-up approach that required the analysis of large amounts of real primary data (archival material) as well as knowledge and validation by domain experts (maritime historians). We present the specification of the ontology, RDFS and OWL implementations, as well as knowledge graphs that make use of this data model for integrating information originating from a large and diverse set of archival documents, such as crew lists, sailors registers, naval ship registers and payrolls. We also describe an application that operates over these knowledge graphs and which supports historians in exploring and quantitatively analysing the integrated data through a user-friendly interface. Finally, we discuss aspects related to the use, evolution and sustainability of the ontology.

Modeling human argumentation should shed light on how knowledge described in information systems could be better accessed, structured, and used for real life research purposes. Current argumentation models are either not analytical enough or restricted to formal logic. For that purpose, we seek a model of human argumentation in which reasoning may not only consist of falsification or verification but more generally of strengthening or weakening hypotheses, and a way to connect this model to an ontology of the domain of discourse. We have studied examples of factual argumentation in empirical research in archaeology. Based on this and other empirical material, we propose an innovative integrated model of factual argumentation that includes evolution, composition, and revision of arguments. It makes explicit both the processes of argument-making and the states of belief at a particular point in time in a composite inference, and connects explicitly to a domain ontology, free of tacit background knowledge. We have implemented the model in a more restricted form and tested it with published archaeological examples. Future work may generalize the model to other kinds of argumentation.