AAPA 2017, New Orleans
RDFBones - Making research explicit: An extensible digital standard for research data
Felix Engel, Stefan Schlager
Poster presented on 22 April 2017 at the 86th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists at New Orleans (Louisiana, USA), session 57 - "Skeletal Standards: Documentation Software, Databases, and Online Digitization Resources Available to Researchers".
Abstract
A fundamental impediment to the adoption of digital standards in physical anthropology is the vast diversity of this area of research. Even within osteology, many investigations require some modification of existing standards to suit their specific study designs. This might be a reason for researchers not to use database software based exclusively on one particular standard. It also makes it difficult to keep track of research data compatibility and to process data from different investigations in one database system. Up to now, comprehensive and monolithic data standards have failed to address these issues.
We propose a different approach, concentrating on the exact definition of individual data items. These are the building blocks researchers can use to describe the various aspects of their research, like skeletal inventories, research methods and work flows, resulting data and their processing employing mathematical transformations or textual conclusions. Because the building blocks of these descriptions are defined beforehand, the degree of compatibility between different investigations becomes evident.
Our data standard, RDFBones, is an RDF (Resource Description Framework) ontology, containing a number of classes and properties for describing anthropological research and materials. Individual researchers can use these elements to define their methodology, load it in the RDFBones web application and use it to record data according to their own standard. So the software helps building standards, instead of prescribing them. Once a standard is formulated, however, it can be published and shared otherwise, supporting uniform methodology. RDFBones also creates a perfect means for sustained long-term data storage.
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”.
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| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Data last updated | 6 April 2017 |
| Metadata last updated | 5 April 2017 |
| Created | 5 April 2017 |
| Format | |
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| State | active |
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