Presentation by Ulf Jakobsson, Swedish National Data Service (SND) Full-day session on archaeological infrastructures and services at the 18th Cultural Heritage and New Technologies (CHNT) conference Vienna, Austria 11th -13th November 2013

1. ARIADNE is funded by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme
Swedish National Data Service (SND)
The OAIS reference model and
archaeological data
Ulf Jakobsson

2. www.snd.gu.se
• Established January 1st 2008 by the
Swedish Research Council
• Hosted by the University of Gothenburg
• Financed by the Swedish Research
Council and the University of Gothenburg
• Social sciences, humanities and medicine
• Originates in SSD (Swedish Social Science Data Service)
• Staff: 31 of which 2 are working with archaeological data
• Digital Archive based on the OAIS model
• Started archiving archeological data in 2011, but is a rapidly
growing area of work
Background and organization of SND

3. www.snd.gu.se
Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model
• The OAIS and its workflow model provide the basis for SND’s
activities and how we handle research data.
Deposition of data
Quality control
Enhancement with metadata
Production of codebooks
Policies and
recommendations
Archiving the data for
long time storage
Data searchable via web
interfaces and accessible
for new research

4. www.snd.gu.se
• The OAIS model has been applied for:
– the data of more than 360 archaeological
surveys (388 datasets; shape-files, reports,
Access databases, >40,000 files, >7.3 GB)
–the long-time storage of parts of the Swedish
Rock Art Archive material
–120,000 images*, 5.8 TB. More material
will be added
– a few thematic databases
• Expect a tenfold increase in data within the next
few years.
* Including lossy compressed versions
SND, OAIS and archaeological data
Swedish Rock Art Research
Archives, www.shfa.se
The west coast of Sweden
has the largest density of
rock art in Europe.

5. www.snd.gu.se
Archaeological data and SND
• Until August 2011 SND did not have any archaeological data
–No knowledge of:
 Structure
 Documentation
 Metadata
 Storage
• Contacted in August 2011
–Project initiated by the County Administrative Board* in
Östergötland, eastern Sweden (one of 21 boards).
 Harmonize available data!
*The County admin. boards are giving permissions to archaeological excavations and surveys. The board is also
the controle authority for how the archaeological material is handled.

6. www.snd.gu.se
Experiences from preparation of data/metadata
• New type of material:
–software!?
–how is the material documented?
–what information in the files can be
 used to describe?
 used to document?
 Extracted?
 used as search criteria in web catalogue?

7. www.snd.gu.se
• Major changes and additions to the internal management
system :
–adaptation to the concept “Geographical information”:
 Coordinates
 bounding box
 polygons
 administrative areas in hierchies (church parish, civil
parish, provinces, counties, municipalities)
 map search
–time periods
–keywords
– direct download without registration

8. www.snd.gu.se
• Spring 2012:
–Delivery with separate data files to 230 rescue/
contract archaeological surveys
 Originated from 5 different organizations (private
archaeology companies, museums, different
sections of the National Heritage Board)
 covering 269 659 square meters
 12 162 archaeological features
 no visible coordinates

9. www.snd.gu.se
Required preparation of data/metadata by the
archeologists for ingest
• Different input of values
– depending on original organization
– depending on operator
• Major changes that had to be done to increase machine
readability*:
– How to set the date for the excavation/survey
– Format of geographical information
*Increased machine readability = easier/faster publication!

10. www.snd.gu.se
• Date in files:
– spring 2001
– May 2000
– April-June 2006
– May 1 to 15 2002
– 2001-08 - 2001-11
– 2003-07, 2003-11
– 2004-10/2005-04
– 2004-05/06
• Date should be given:
– in ISO format (yy-mm-dd/yy-mm)
– with start/finish-format in different fields

11. www.snd.gu.se
• For better understanding of ”place”
information; the geographical
information should be divided into
five fields instead of one (counties,
provinces, municipalities, civil parish
and church parish).
County Province Municipality Civil parish
Östergötland Östergötland Linköping, Mjölby Slaka, Vikingstad, Viby, Sya, Mjölby
Östergötland Östergötland Motala, Mjölby Russingstorp
Östergötland Östergötland Linköping Slaka

12. www.snd.gu.se
• Autumn 2012
– Coordinate fields added = Bounding Box information
possible!
– Format for date changed
–157 new studies deposited
–coordinate fields added by depositor
–After discussion with data provider, ”place”
information has been divided into four fields
–330 studies published

13. www.snd.gu.se
• In 2013:
– The ”place” information divided into four fields for all GIS-data
– Management system reprogrammed to handle the
information
– New ingest of the geographical information must be done
– In order to enable citation of data, assigning persistant links to
studies/datasets. Data can then be linked to other information
such as related reports, papers or other relevant data.
– 47 studies published

14. www.snd.gu.se
Access and re-use of archeological data
• The GIS data
– directly downloadable
– without any registration
– for anyone who wants to use
– versioning fully implemented

15. www.snd.gu.se
• Most of the information
in the web catalogue SND
extracts from the shape
files,
• But also the information
we take from the reports,
can be seen (and
searched for) in SNDs web
catalogue.

16. www.snd.gu.se
• Dataset
–shape files
–Access database
• Dataset and excavation report in Swedish
• Metadata partially translated to English
• The material will be searchable via the ARIADNE
infrastructure…

17. www.snd.gu.se
Polygon information can be extracted from shape files, transferred to management system (DDI), displayed via map in a open source system… Information fields must be added.

18. www.snd.gu.se
Conclusion: In the future
• New Management system
• New map interface
• New search system
• Better system for data deposition
• Automated system for assigning persistent identifiers
• More cooperation with the Swedish National Heritage Board
• Better statistics for downloads