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The Archaeotools Project: Faceted Classification and Natural Language Processing in an Archaeological Context

This article appeared in Crossing Boundaries: Computational Science, E-Science and Global E-Infrastructures, ed. P. Coveney, a special themed issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (A): Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. Phil Trans A is an extremely prestigious journal published by the Royal Society of London and ranked 8th in the world for multidisciplinary journals by the SJR (3rd in the UK) with a score of 0.826 and H index of 66 (2011). I am lead author on this article and was responsible for c.80% of the whole work. The article 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, a collaboration between three major funding bodies, AHRC, EPSRC and JISC (2007-9). This project built upon previous ADS research to develop search tools (the Common Information Environment - Archaeobrowser project ) nallowing archaeologists to discover, share and analyse datasets and legacy publications, hitherto very difficult to integrate into existing digital frameworks. This research was instrumental in allowing the ADS to develop its ‘ArchSearch’ facility, in turn a major contributory factor in the awarding of Digital Preservation Coalition’s Decennial Award, for outstanding contribution to digital preservation in the last ten years to the ADS in 2012. This is an international award and the ADS faced competition from Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the International Internet Preservation Consortium (http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/blog/2012/12/ads-wins-dpc-decennial-award/). The research elements dealing with faceted classification discussed in the article lead directly to a further collaborative project ‘TAG: Transatlantic Archaeology Gateway’ with the ADS and Digital Antiquity (Arizona State University) being funded by JISC and the National Endowment for the Humanities ($316781 USD).