Ontological Modeling for Excavation Documentation and Virtual Reconstruction of an Ancient Egyptian Site

Abstract

In this article we introduce our semantic modeling approach for data from over 50 years of excavations at Tell el-Daba in Egypt. The CIDOC CRM with some of its extensions is used as an ontological framework to provide the semantics for creating a knowledge graph containing material remains, excavated areas, and documentation resources. An objective of the project A Puzzle in 4D is to digitize the documentation and create metadata for analog and digital resources in order to provide the data to the research community and facilitate future work for this important archaeological site. Using an example of 3D reconstruction of a tomb, we show how the knowledge graph linked to digital resources can be exploited for a specific task to encounter available information that is essential for a virtual reconstruction. Moreover, we show an approach of modeling to represent the interpretations supporting reconstructions as well as relate them to the sources used, thus providing transparency for the model and provenance data. Modeling for excavation documentation as well as virtual reconstruction has been tailored to the large amount of data processed from the project. The goal is to propose a semantic modeling feasible even on a large scale while still preserving the basic underlying ontological structures.