Digital Monte Iato

Since 1971, the University of Zurich has been developing the archaeological research at the ancient and medieval settlement on Monte Iato near Palermo, Sicily, from the very first step onwards and has brought it to an international research site, where, for example, the University of Innsbruck conducts annual field research as well. The documentation includes a wide variety of archaeological documentation formats, such as on-site documentation with sketches, plans, inventories, photographs of the finds and the excavation sites, profile drawings, etc.

Some of these have already been digitised, but are only available as PDF files on the Institute's website. SARI will developed a pipeline and a research platform that enables higher visibility and easy access to the documentation of the excavations by following the principles of Open Research Data (ORD). This means that data need to be interoperable and reusable. To guarantee these requirements, the platform is based on semantic technologies and Linked Open Data, which also allows data to be linked and enriched with further research data from external resources.

In the first phase of the project, SARI built the pipeline and the platform in ResearchSpace for the Department of Archaeology (UZH), providing a fundamental basis for visibility and access to the extensive excavation data.