Following the success of the original project, follow-up ARIADNEplus will extend both the scope of the online Portal and its geographical and temporal reach.
The original ARIADNE Portal integrated about 2 millions data records and built up an extensive community of archaeological institutions involving around 11,000 participants across Europe and beyond. ARIADNEplus will focus on: expanding the geographical coverage of the Portal to include data from areas where there is little or none at present, the disciplinary coverage to include palaeoanthropology, bioarchaeology, environmental archaeology, monuments as well as the results of scientific analyses, such as material sciences, and also the time span of the data by including datasets from palaeoanthropology, to more recent industrial archaeology and WWI archaeology.
The forty partners involved in the new venture will meet for the first time at PIN in Prato on Monday 11th February 2019 for the plenary meeting. The original consortium will welcome sixteen new partners who include several from central and eastern Europe as well as the US, Israel and the CARARE Association. The meeting continues on Tuesday where the current state of the art concerning the integration of scientific data and multi-lingual vocabularies will be discussed, followed by break-out sessions focussing on datasets from specific disciplines such as inscriptions and human paleo-biology which are new to the Portal.
Datasets are at the heart of ARIADNE and after the new types of datasets to be added have been discussed, the meeting continues on Wednesday with the practicalities of mapping datasets to the CIDOC-CRM related schema developed in the original infrastructure. The related action, PARTHENOS, has contributed to the future development of ARIADNEplus through its work on interoperability and application of the FAIR Principles, leading to an update of the original schema and some useful Guidelines for researchers to follow when creating and utilising their new datasets. The Steering Committee takes place on the same day.
The final day of the plenary will focus on innovation and the overall strategy for ARIADNEplus. At the European level, there has been several developments since the end of the original action in 2016 with European Open Science Cloud coming to the fore and the establishment of new research infrastructures as well as ERICs (e.g. CLARIN in the Humanities). This also includes, SEADDA, a new COST action which will establish a priority research area in the archiving, dissemination and open access re-use of archaeological data.
All of these have an impact and contribute to the way forward for this exciting new project.