OpenArchaeo - Semantic web plateform for archaeological data

MASA (Mémoire des Archéologues et des Sites Archéologiques), a consortium of the TGIR Huma-Num, in partnership with the SPARNA company, specialized in semantic web, and the Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale et Appliquée de Tours (LIFAT), has developed the OpenArchaeo semantic web platform. Exploiting the archaeological triplestores paired with the CIDOC in a federated way, OpenArchaeo has been designed with two distinct interfaces. The Explorer, resolutely user-friendly, is based on a system of icons and concepts well understood by archaeologists (Stratigraphic Unit, Artifact, Feature, Site...). In order to produce a SPARQL query from the natural language, OpenArchaeo has been the subject of the development of the SPARNATURAL component, which is modular and reusable. This system enables to generate a SPARQL query intuitively, without knowledge of the SPARQL language, but with knowledge of the main concepts of archaeology. The SPARQL endpoint is a query service to write federated queries to multiple sources in SPARQL language (query language dedicated to the semantic web). This interface is associated with web services to exploit the MASA Triplestore. Its purpose is to be operated by machines and is therefore more accessible to computer specialists.