ArchaeoKM: Realizing Knowledge of the Archaeologists

The potentiality of ontology within the faculty of archaeology has recently been felt. However, the use of ontology is limited either within the data interoperability for data sharing within various heterogeneous platforms or data integration of heterogeneous dataset. Thus the full potentiality of ontology is still to be realized within the community of archaeology. We are developing a system “ArchaeoKM” which uses ontology beyond data integration. It uses the strength of ontology to reason the knowledge presented within. Additionally, ArchaeoKM involves archaeologists to define their knowledge of an excavation site through domain rules which they define through the descriptions and observations of the findings from the site. These domain rules are core of ArchaeoKM as they represent knowledge of the archaeologists. The advancement in semantic web technology has been the backbone principles behind ArchaeoKM. It relies heavily on semantic annotations to provide semantic view of the data set. The rules and the rule markup languages are major design issues of any semantic web application. ArchaeoKM realizes these through the rules defined by the archaeologists and transforms them to machine readable format to generate the necessary results. Moving on, the application integrates spatial operations and functions within semantic web to add value for the knowledge interpretation. The inclusion of spatial operations and functions provided by the commercial database systems enhance the capability of ArchaeoKM as archaeologists can combine both semantic and spatial rule to define the knowledge.