HYPERTHESEAU - Hyper thesaurus and data lakes: mining the city and its archaeological archives (2018)

Summary:

HyperThesau seeks to establish to a systemic overview of the impact of digital technology on scientific archaeology and on the construction, by its public, of a collective, 'imaginary' vision of its cultural and urban heritage. The project will drawn on ontology, system architecture and the user experience of interactions between a hybrid archaeological community - from established scientists to students and enlightened amateurs - and a heterogeneous corpus of data in terms of format, nature and cultural reference spaces.
Taking a 'usage-oriented' approach, a chain of methodological, semantic and technological tools will be applied to the data of old urban sites more or less extensively digitised. By focusing reflection on the relationship between the human user and archaeological 'objects of knowledge' in a digital context, we will examine the intersection of two 'life cycles': the scientific life, in the laboratory, of the data acquired, organised, studied, archived and shared by professionals, more often than not with limited means; and the 'experiential'/contributive cycle of the community of non-professionals, who forge both a personal and collective relationship with the vestige, the site and the associated data.
HyperThesau will design, prototype and test a mini information system under real conditions:

- a collaborative scientific flow combining interdisciplinary methodology and business expertise for the semantic enrichment and documentarisation of archaeological data (material, archives, 2D/3D modelling, etc.): to do this, we will add to the archaeological reference thesaurus (PACTOLS) and align it to non-francophone nomenclatures;

- the design of a database, software tools and a system architecture for the recording, searching, enrichment and evolutionary management of these data, their long-term archiving in the Huma-Num research infrastructure and respect for their interoperability;
- a mini socio-technical channel for the acquisition-semantisation of archaeological data for a hybrid public of professionals, students and qualified amateurs; we will test the interconnection
with/in the 65 MB participatory science platform of the French Natural History Museum.
Together, this will constitute an innovative and inclusive platform for archaeological practices, by broadening the scientific community's frameworks, designing and prototyping operational methods for the long-term indexing/archiving of harvestable data and, ultimately, by the possible inclusion of qualified amateurs in operations to enrich shared data.