Arachne (Archaeological Database)

Arachne (Archaeological Database)

Arachne is the central object-database of the German Archaeological Institute (http://www.dainst.org/index_3455_de.html). In 2004 the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and the Research Archive for Ancient Sculpture at the University of Cologne (FA) joined their efforts in providing and further developing Arachne as a tool for free internet-based research.

Arachnes database-design uses a world model that tries to build on one of the most basic assumptions one can make about archaeology, classical archaeology or art history: all activities in these areas can most generally be described as contextual objects. So Arachne tried to avoid the basic mistakes of earlier databases, who limited their object modelling to specific project-oriented aspects, thus creating separated containers of only a small number of objects. All objects inside Arachne share a general part of their object model, to which a more class-specific part is added that describes the specialised properties of a category of material like architecture or topography. Seen on the level of the general part, a powerful pool of material can be used for general information retrieval, whereas on the level of categories and properties, very specific structures can be displayed.

Started in 1995 as a database for ancient sculpture on FileMaker, the development of Arachne since 2001 benefited from the newly established chair for Humanities Computing at Cologne university. Since then Arachne ist also a testbed for students engaged in complex and serious database-related development projects.

Thanks to significant and ongoing support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft since 2001, Arachne started to integrate negative archives of ancient sculpture that went beyond the specialised documentation retained in Cologne itself: the Malter- and Fittschen Archives, and since 2003 the negatives of ancient sculpture of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome. All that totaled in 40.000 high quality scans of ancient sculptures, that are presented with a state-of-the-art scientific documentation. Starting in 2006, the digitalization of historic glass plate negative collections will result in another 40.000 digital images, beginning with those of the German Archaeological Institutes in Athens, Cairo and Istanbul. Beside this larger projects lots of activities are going on on different levels, for example the online preparations for the »Corpus der Antiken Sarkophagreliefs«.

In 2004 Arachne has been reworked from the bottom structurally as well as editorially. After that it has been rebuilt from scratch using an MAMP environment. Being strategically positioned as a central object-database for a large federal institution which possesses about 2 millions of images inside their photographic archives and produces even more data each year in the course of its research activities, Arachne's potential is not too modest. To meet it, there is still a long way to go.

Starting from where we are as in week 39 of 2008, Arachne contains about 2785 registered users who can access 316.716 scans and 210.000 objects free of charge. Quality of data differs regarding the state of documentation and has to be improved in the areas where just a basic description took place. Forecasting the target area in quantities one could refer to statistical estimations of huge digitization-projects of cultural heritage in Europe. They foresee being able to digitize approximately 30 % of the existing material in the given financial circumstances. That would lead in the region of 700.000 digital images from archive material. With addition of newly produced documentation, one could hope for 1 million 20 or 30 years from now.All objects should then reflect their contextualisations in basic categories of material and topography. All categories of material cultural heritage from classical antiquity as well as from Asia and South America should then be integrated. Regarding interoperability, different steps have been taken to ensure the widest possible use and visibility of data, while on the other hand fulfilling the liabilities of intellectual property rights-management and copyright-protection, that DAI and FA took when documenting in the framework of collections, museums, excavations etc. Technical aspects of interoperability do address the way data is shared and connected inside the DAI itself, mainly between Arachne and several GIS who are being used on DAI excavations and surveys - so a given object will only reside once inside the overall dataspace of DAI, minimizing redundancy. In that sense DAI will support uniform resource identifiers (URI) in the near future, to unmistakable identify objects residing in Arachne. It is the policy of DAI and FA to implement the CIDOC-Content Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM), for which different project-applications are ongoing. Newly implemented is the support for the Open Archives Initiative. As a partner of CLAROSnet Arachne is committed to work on the issues mentioned above as well as to build a multilingual interface, that it lacks until today. In October of 2008 Arachne is i18n-ready, so the technical framework for internationalization has been implemented. After the necessary translation-work Arachne will have an english und italian GUI in 2009. It was the policy of DAI and FA to address issues of that complexity not on their own but in an international framework. A solution must be found for this in the near future.

Another section of Arachne is providing ancient books with no Intellectual Property rights on them; here Arachne is at 201 volumes with 47.799 pages, for which annotations can be made. In the long run a linking between the objects in those volumes and the objects in the databases is planned. This has been done in an exemplary way with Scipione Maffei's book about the Museo Maffeiano from 1749 and Clarac's Musée de Sculpture antique et moderne from 1828 onwards. On the technical road map for the next years the integration of specific material categories will have to be finalized. Therefore the Arachne thesaurus will have to be expanded. A better treatment of search results will have to be implemented, as well as a clearer history function. The general problems in displaying huge search results are well known on the web or in databases as such. Arachne is no exception here and will have to integrate its »context browsing« feature with a topic map design, that allows to switch between more graphically and more textual displays of information.

Sources

* [http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/ Arachne]
* [http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/stichwerke/ Rare Books and Etchings in Arachne]
* [http://www.archaeologie.uni-koeln.de/ Archäologisches Institut der Universität zu Köln]
* [http://www.dainst.org/ Deutsches Archäologisches Institut]
* [http://www.hki.uni-koeln.de/ Humanities Computing, Cologne]


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