Digital Monte Iato

Since 1971, the University of Zurich has been involved in the excavations at Monte Iato together with the University of Innsbruck. The Department of Archaeology (UZH) now holds extensive documentation of the excavations, which are highly relevant and require a reassessment of the Roman-Hellenistic urban settlement of Ietas.
The documentation includes a wide variety of objects such as find books with sketches, maps, inventories, photographs of the findings and the excavation sites, profile drawings, preliminary reports and the so-called Bergbüchlein as well as published articles of the findings.

Some of these have already been digitised, but are only available as PDF files on the Institute's website. SARI will develop 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, which will start at the end of 2024 and last approximately 6 months, SARI will build the pipeline for the Department of Archaeology as a fundamental basis for visibility and access to the extensive excavation data. The second phase of the project will focus on the development of the Linked Open Data platform.