A Framework for Managing Temporal Dimensions in Archaeological Data

Time and space are two important characteristics of archaeological data. As regards to the first aspect, in literature many time dimensions for archaeology have been defined which extend from the excavation time, to the dating of archaeological objects. Standard ISO 19018 describes temporal characteristics of geographical information in terms of both geometric and topological primitives. The first aim of this paper is to analyze the applicability of such Standard for representing archaeological data, referring to the model adopted by the city of Verona (Italy) as case study. However, since archaeological dates are often subjective, estimated and imprecise, one of the main lack in the Standard is the inability to incorporate such vagueness in date representation. Therefore, the second contribution of this paper is the extension of the Standard in order to represent fuzzy dates and fuzzy relationships among them. Finally, considering the process through which objects are usually manually dated by archeologists, some existing automatic techniques for time reasoning may be successfully applied in this context in order to guide the dating process. For this purpose, the last paper contribution regards the translation of some archaeological temporal data into a Fuzzy Temporal Constraint Network (FTCN) for checking the overall data consistency and reducing the vagueness of some dates based on their relationships with other ones.