Underwater Archaeological Knowledge Analysis and Representation in the Venus Project : a Preliminary Draft

One of the VENUS’ objectives aims to provide underwater archaeologists with software for signal, data and information processing and management. In last decades, such tools have only focused on the geometric aspects; however, in order to integrate the archaeologist’s knowledge and designing tools managing both data and knowledge, an appropriate formal representation is required. Our goal is to investigate how artificial intelligence methods and tools could be used to represent archaeological information and to formalize reasoning processes used within this context. The paper presents a preliminary underwater archaeological knowledge analysis performed after the first mission of the project on the wreck site of Pianosa in october 2006. It proposes a preliminary representation of underwater archaeological observations and related knowledge by means of an ontology, based on the CIDOC-CRM model.