AAPA 2016, Atlanta
Integration of contextual information with bioanthropological data from skeletal collections
Felix Engel, Stefan Schlager
Poster presented on 15 April 2016 at the 85th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists at Atlanta (Georgia, USA), session 30 - "Human Skeletal Biology: Functional Studies".
Abstract
Physical anthropologists examine human remains from various contexts, including historical research collections, archaeological excavations and forensic investigations. As a consequence, analyses rely on a broad range of contextual information, varying between institutions, sites, campaigns and cases. We propose solutions how to formally express such connections within our recently presented digital framework for managing research data in skeletal collections, which is formulated as an ontology complying with the resource description framework (RDF).
Seven skeletal collections with different profiles were surveyed to assess what contextual information is available with reference to the human remains they are holding. Possible relations to materials, processes and agents in bioanthropological studies were recorded or inferred. These findings were complemented by contextual information that might occur in research that was not represented by the collections under study.
Building on the existing framework, mechanisms were developed to represent the types of reference identified in the survey. This process was guided by the principle of parsimony, introducing as few RDF classes and properties as possible, while keeping the ontology complex enough to identify analogous and compatible entities across different contexts.
The resulting ontology provides simple mechanisms for expressing a wide range of references to provenance, geographical and spatial origin, association with structures, documents, people and organizations as well as inventory and classification systems. It is ready for implementatin in semantic web applications and will be part of a software that is currently being developed. Queries on such systems can draw on semantic inferences provided by the RDF.
This project is funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG) under the title “Human Skeletal Collections: Development of Standards for the Access to Historical Anthropological/Anatomical Research Collections”.
Additional Information
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Data last updated | 12 May 2016 |
| Metadata last updated | 12 May 2016 |
| Created | 12 May 2016 |
| Format | |
| License | Other (Not Open) |
| Datastore active | False |
| Has views | True |
| Id | 32eca3b0-8ab5-4e01-a892-dc389112ad77 |
| Package id | 9c055139-c290-40b4-a9a7-3a5e382acdf0 |
| Position | 3 |
| State | active |
| Url type | upload |