AAPA 2015, St. Louis
A Digital Framework for Managing Research Data in Skeletal Collections
Felix Engel, Stefan Schlager
Poster presented on 28 March 2015 at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists at St. Louis (Missouri, USA), session 53 - "Forensic anthropology and taphonomy".
Abstract
In Physical Anthropology, an increasing number of studies relies on large amounts of data. Standards and software tools for structured data collection are being developed. As a consequence, volumes of digital data accumulate on various systems, but pooling these sources remains complicated and time-consuming.
We propose a digital standard for the representation of research data from human skeletal remains, enabling a free exchange between different types of data storage systems. Our aim is to enable institutions holding skeletal collections to curate related data and to make it available for future research.
Our standard is defined as an ontology that represents data as a network of relations between objects and properties, rather than a relational set of tables. It is developed within the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as an integral part of technologies related to the semantic web.
In practice, it facilitates data collection and recording of results. Additionally, it serves as an interoperability layer between existing collection management systems, skeletal documentation software and research data bases. The ontology is extensible, implementing existing data collection standards and allowing researchers to extend these to fit their specific research objectives. This approach reconciles the collections' interest to build up consistent stocks of data and the ambition of researchers to open up new areas of research and methodology.
Here we present the ontology, which will be implemented in a server-based data base application. It is developed in collaboration with established skeletal collections and will be released for free under a permissive Open Source license.
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 | 24 September 2015 |
| Metadata last updated | 31 March 2015 |
| Created | 31 March 2015 |
| Format | |
| License | Other (Not Open) |
| Datastore active | False |
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| State | active |
| Url type | upload |