Some excellent news from inside the Heritage Practice Communities in a Digitized World SRN community: 

A new international project is starting in 2025 between University of Helsinki (UH) (HELDIG/ HSSH, PI Dr. Jouni Tuominen), KU Leuven (PI Prof. Pieterjan Deckers), and Aalto University, Dept. of Computer Science (PI Prof. Eero Hyvönen) on applying Semantic Web technologies to archaeological Digital Humanities. The project also includes collaborations with the University of Reading and the British Museum, UK (Dr. Eljas Oksanen).

Problem statement

Since the 19th century, archaeological artefacts have been organised into typologies by their morphological features, such as form, production technique and decoration. Such data is of great value for Digital Humanities (DH) research. However, while the cataloguing frameworks in use today are powerful tools for assessing, categorising and investigating archaeological materials, they come with inherent limitations:

1. The frameworks are not multivocal. Typologies rely on hierarchical organisation of traits where deliberate ontological choices have been made to best serve typically one purpose. However, there are numerous other possible ways to organise the material for other needs.
2. The frameworks are inflexible. As new finds are made or the scope of an archaeological category is redefined, existing “fossilised” classification schemes may no longer suffice but they are difficult to modify and extend. This problem is exacerbated when digitising collections.
3. The frameworks are not transnational. The frameworks are rooted in national and sometimes problematic conceptions of culture, and often limited by the constraints imposed by the scholarly traditions in modern nation states. Typically, each artefact is given its place in a phylogenetic tree, with impact on both scientific analysis (e.g., for artefact chronology) and for public perception (e.g., regarding cultural associations of artefacts).
4. The frameworks are largely not interoperable from a semantic point of view, making them unsuitable for aggregated services, FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) data publications and for developing web services.

The ARCH-ON project addresses these fundamental issues of representing archaeological knowledge for Digital Humanities research in a transnational setting. It develops a new ontology-based semantic approach to archaeological knowledge representation (KR), using FAIR data principles and semantic web technologies.

Congratulations to the researchers at the University of Helsinki, KU Leuven, and Aalto University and their British partners for this exciting new project! We can't wait to see the results!