Promoting Interoperability on the Datasets of the Arrowheads Findings of the Chalcolithic and the Early/Middle Bronze Age

Archaeological discoveries can benefit enormously from linked open data (LOD) technologies since, as new objects are discovered, data about them can be placed in the LOD cloud and instantly accessible to third parties. This article presents a framework developed to publish LOD on arrowheads from the Chalcolithic and Early/Middle Bronze Age chronologies (2800/2900 BC to 1500 BC) found in the last 25 years of excavations on an archaeological site in Portugal. These arrowheads were kept in boxes, hidden from the possibility of being studied and viewed by interested parties. The framework encompasses a metadata application profile (MAP) and tools to be used with this MAP, such as a namespace, two metadata schemas and eight vocabulary coding schemes. The MAP domain model was developed with the support of the scientific literature about this type of arrowheads, and the team integrated two archaeologists. This framework was created with the design philosophy of maximising data interoperability, so terms from the CIDOC CRM conceptual models and other vocabularies widely used in the LOD cloud were used. The MAP was tested using a set of seven arrowheads, which proved, in the first instance, the viability of the developed MAP. The team plans to test the model in future work with arrowheads of other excavations.