The CARARE metadata schema was designed to support harvesting archaeology and architecture. Monuments and buildings are complex, multi-layered objects with dynamic lives. A wealth of digital information objects relating to different aspects of the tangible and intangible heritage exist - from texts, plans, drawings and images, to folk memories, diaries, stories, news papers and traditional skills. The digital heritage landscape is now going beyond metadata for individual objects instead seeking to support associations between objects, places, people and events, integrating information sources and providing for narratives. In developing version 3 of the CARARE metadata schema the authors seek to increase the support for linked data and contextualisation, and to support new uses of the schema particularly as a data capture format. The paper describes the development methodology, use cases, design challenges and considerations made in defining the new version, and prototyping of the schema. Semantic Omeka is being used to test the data capture use case.

1. Archaeology and Architecture in Europeana
Lund, 20th June 2018
Connecting archaeology and
architecture data: updating the
CARARE metadata schema
Kate Fernie, 2Culture Associates
Dimitris Gavrilis and Christos
Papatheodorou, Athena Research Centre

2. Archaeology and architecture
Archaeological monuments and historic buildings are complex,
multi-layered objects with dynamic lives.

3. Wealth of (digital) information objects
• Tangible heritage - monuments, buildings, landscapes,
artefacts, building components
• texts, plans, images, sketches, notes, 3D scans, scientific data,
catalogues, inventories, analyses
• Excavation and survey reports, conservation status, etc.
• Intangible heritage - histories, folk memories, traditional
skills, social significance
• narratives, diaries, news papers, media broadcasts
• Reference resources – gazetteers, vocabularies

4. The emerging digital heritage landscape
• Going beyond metadata for individual objects
• Making associations with places, people, events and
objects
• Integrating information sources
• Providing for interpretation, narrative and storytelling

5. CARARE metadata

6. CARARE metadata schema
Background
• Began life in 2010 as a schema designed to enable
harvesting of metadata from multiple archaeological and
architectural heritage archives for aggregation in
Europeana
• The schema is based on CIDOC core standards, MIDAS
Heritage and LIDO and is compatible with CIDOC CRM and
the Europeana Data Model
• Extended in 2012 to increase the support for 3D
http://pro.carare.eu/doku.php?id=metadata

7. Uses of the CARARE metadata schema
The uses of the schema includes:
• An intermediary to support cross-walks between native
metadata schemes in national language and a standard
format
• An XML export format from databases and repositories
• A data capture format for databases and digital libraries
Interest from developers in using the schema is increasing

8. Developing version 3
We asked ourselves:
• What would make the schema easier for our data
partners?
• What would make the schema more friendly to the needs
of developers?
• How can we support connections better?

9. Updating the schema: data partner perspective
CARARE
Collection
information
Heritage
asset
Digital
resource
Activity
*
*
• Considered use cases
• for museum objects, monuments,
buildings, 3D models and shipwrecks
• analysing the use of elements (whether
they need to be mandatory, optional or
repeatable, or linked to controlled
vocabularies) for each case
• Considered duplication/redundancy,
e.g. in the record information

10. Updating the schema: Europeana perspective
• Reviewed the mapping of
CARARE to EDM
• Analysed the use of
elements
• Support for Linked Data
within the CARARE
schema

11. Aims
• Next generation of the schema
• Compatible with previous versions
• Improved structure and documentation
• Adaptable for implementation in specific use cases, e.g. for
documentation
• Improved connections between objects and support for the
semantic web

12. Design challenges & considerations
• The CARARE metadata schema was designed originally
as a metadata harvesting protocol, to mediate between
different native schemas and aggregate data with minimal
information loss
• It had a nested structure (of elements and classes) that
presented some challenges for implementation
• One of the considerations is to move towards a more
developer friendly (rdf oriented) schema
• reducing the nesting and
• Increasing the support for linked data

13. Methodology for the development
Current status
• Initial evaluation and
analysis has been
completed
• Version 3 exists in draft form
• XSD is available in draft
• Now prototyping
Evaluation
Use case analysis
Drafting schema & XSD
Prototyping (in systems)
Finalising
RDFJSON

14. Prototyping
• Athena Research Centre is currently prototyping the schema
using Semantic Omeka, this will:
• Help to evaluate version 3 of the CARARE schema in one of
the use case (for documentation and data capture)
• Support a need expressed by the CARARE user community

15. Next steps
• More prototyping
• Testing and evaluation of the results
• Finalising the development
• Enabling the use cases
• Implementing support for the user community

16. Thanks for your attention
kfernie27@gmail.com
d.gavrilis@dcu.gr