D5.7 Mapping of technical, repository-specific harvesting endpoints to jointly agreed domain-specific standards and coordination of semantic mapping procedures
During the first period of the EOSC-Nordic project, Task 5.1 concentrated on the integration and discoverability of Nordic community-specific data in EOSC via a central search portal: EUDAT B2FIND1. This has been described in detail in Deliverable D5.12, including lessons learned, a FAIR evaluation and a handbook for metadata ingestion for B2FIND.
In the second period of the project, Task 5.1 focused on a new structure for community-specific ‘search spaces’ on the one hand and on the implementation of ‘semantics’ on the other hand to enhance both visibility and discoverability of research output even if different languages such as Norwegian, Danish, and English are used. The outcome of these activities is described in this deliverable.
Using an applied rather than a theoretical approach, we investigated how new features in B2FIND could benefit archaeologists in the Nordic countries, namely two national data providers for archaeological research providing sites and monuments records (SMR): the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces (Slots-og Kulturstyrelsen, or short: SLKS) and the Norwegian Askeladden SMR. These two harvested repositories from Denmark and Norway cover all archaeological finds from these two countries.
initially, EOSC-Nordic planned to focus only on a subset from these two repositories: finds from the Viking period, as these were considered specifically Nordic3 – however, this strategy was broadened in the working period since a restricted focus on the Viking period would have contradicted our long term ambition which aims at general applicability (independent from a particular period). Therefore, we created the “Nordic Archaeology” community (including all records from all periods, i.e., beyond just the Viking period) that may be enlarged by other data providers for archeological research in the Nordic countries. Our starting point is almost 400 000 metadata records (which again are references to millions of observations and findings), making “Nordic Archaeology” the largest B2FIND community and thus a discovery option serving anybody interested in the remains of the past.
For integrating semantics, we investigated to what extent already existing community-specific thesauri could be re-used or what would be the reasons for not using them, respectively. One outcome is a mapping table that allows the mapping of different concepts to describe archeological findings used in Norway and Denmark and an additional English translation for these terms. This mapping table is used in B2FIND´s metadata ingestion to enrich values for the <subject>field of a record with the assigned terms and hence allows users to search and find archeological data using any language supported by the mapping table.
Read the deliverable on Zenodo.