Integrating Heterogeneous Coin Datasets in the Context of Archaeological Research

This paper describes the activities carried out under the ARIADNE project to demonstrate the item-level integration process of archaeological archives through the use of semantic technologies. To this end, some ancient coin records, coming from the archives of important European archaeological institutions, were selected. The subset thus created, has been carefully analysed by means of specific tools to identify similar concepts and common metadata elements that could serve as the basis for integration. CIDOC CRM was chosen as the conceptual model for encoding the identified entities, while some important numismatic vocabularies have been employed to improve standardisation. The implementation phase has benefited from the use of advanced tools for mapping and conversion of the original information in a semantic form (RDF), the creation of a triple store to place the newly integrated data and the necessary interfaces for accessing and querying them.