Investigating a multi-paradigm system for the management of archaeological data: Corpus Lapidum Burgundiae

Scientific Information Systems (SIS) must move beyond data repositories and closed systems, to allow collaborations among different research disciplines, to include new types of data, to control data quality, and to enable semantic interoperability. Archaeological data include textual information, measures, sketches, photographies, 3D models, and a vast amount of links between data and historical information sources. We develop a formal model for ontology-based annotations that conforms to a semi-ring algebraic structure and we define a subset of algebraic operators to query annotations. We show how our approach is instantiated in a collaborative Web platform for the Burgundy Stone project.