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Integrating Archaeological Literature into Resource Discovery Interfaces Using Natural Language Processing and Name Authority Services

This article appears in the proceedings of the 2009 5th Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on e-Science workshops. Sponsored by Computer Society – C, the e-Science conference is designed to bring together leading international and interdisciplinary research communities, developers, and users of e-Science applications and enabling IT technologies. I am lead author on this article and was responsible for c.80% of the whole work. The article itself draws on an research undertaken during a two year interdisciplinary collaborative research project, ‘Archaeotools’ (£321,817), between the Archaeology Data Service (ADS, where I was then Deputy Director) and the Natural Language Processing Research Group at the University of Sheffield funded under the e-Science Research Grants Scheme which itself is a collaboration between three major funding bodies, the AHRC, the EPSRC and the JISC (2007-9). This article focusses on the development of a methodology for extracting place names and/or coordinates from legacy literature, including archaeological grey literature, and making them discoverable via geo-referencing and geospatial interfaces. This element of the Archaeotools research project led directly to a practical implementation of grey-literature discovery tools via the ADS web site (along with the implementation of DOIs to grey literature via the British Library DataCite project). This work was recognised in 2012 when it was awarded the British Archaeological Awards (BAA) award for Best Archaeological Innovation (http://www.archaeologyuk.org/awards/baa2012.html#inno)