DURA-EUROPOS ARCHIVE

IDEA is using Linked Open Data (LOD) to reassemble and recontextualize archaeological data from Dura-Europos... In an effort to mitigate the physical dispersal of Dura-Europos' artifacts and other archival materials, IDEA seeks to pave a pathway to digital reassembly... While a sizable proportion of excavated Durene artifacts (c. 15,000) are in collections belonging to Yale University, even those artifacts happen to be spread across three different Yale-affiliated institutions: the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. As each institution follows field-specific best practices, metadata relevant to Dura objects has not been aligned in such a way that artifacts kept in these collections can easily "speak" across institutional borders. This is precisely the kind of divide that Linked Open Data (LOD) was envisioned to bridge. The IDEA team has developed and documented a process to join-up Yale's Dura-..