An ontological application for archaeological narratives

The CIPHER project was set up in April 2002 as a thirty month project supported by the European Union. The project aims to give the public new ways of accessing cultural heritage information from around Europe using new technologies. These technologies are intended to help organise knowledge and cultural heritage narratives. The technology helps to present these narratives on the Internet and provides editing, communication and discussion tools. Visitors are able to customise and add to these narratives using tools provided by the partners. This paper is concerned with the development of the Irish Cultural Heritage Forum - explorer, ie. This forum was developed by The Dublin Institute of Technology and The Discovery Programme and gives online access to a database of Irish archaeology held by the Discovery Programme. This includes the complete National Monuments Record (NMR). The NMR is a list of categorised and detailed monument data for Ireland and Northern Ireland showing, for example, a monument\´s geographical position. Importantly the forum provides access to a large set of "lessons" explaining and putting into context these monuments and artefacts. These lessons are primarily short texts which explain some aspect of Irish archaeology. The CH forum uses knowledge management techniques developed by the CIPHER partners including a specially adapted ontology of archaeological objects and concepts. This paper describes the process of adapting the Archaeological Monuments and Objects ontology developed by English Heritage to the objects in the Irish NMR. It describes how the FISH data standardization effort was used to guide this process and how the resulting ontology complies with the MIDAS collections guidelines. The paper outlines the architecture of the prototype application which allows authors and ordinary users of the site to relate their own lessons to this ontology and in this way to construct a broad ranging but structured description of the domain of Irish archaeology.