Vocabulary mapping for archaeological infrastructure

This article reports and reflects on vocabulary mapping techniques, tools and experience from the ARIADNE European archaeological infrastructure projects, where the widely differing terminology of subject indexing in the different partner languages posed significant challenges for effective data integration. The Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus is employed as a central spine vocabulary for partners to map their native vocabularies and term lists – a hub structure enables a multilingual search capability via vocabulary mapping. Mappings are expressed via SKOS mapping relationships and output as structured JSON for use in the overall data aggregation process and in the ARIADNE portal. The approach followed offers some automatic support for final intellectual judgement. The method can be characterised as providing lexical support in an interactive tool that aims to intuitively visualise semantic context. The experience of partners in producing the vocabulary mappings is discussed in light of previous work in this area. Reflections on lessons learned both for the immediate project and for vocabulary mapping in general contribute to the conclusions. Future search functionality could take account of available vocabulary mappings via a range of search options, such as query expansion including compound mappings and mapping types. Further work on mapping guidelines and metadata is recommended.