Eric Lacombe, Dominik Lukas, Sébastien DurostPlease use the format "First name initials family name" as in "Marie S. Curie, Niels H. D. Bohr, Albert Einstein, John R. R. Tolkien, Donna T. Strickland"
<p>The adoption of Archaeological Information Systems (AIS) evolves according to multiple factors, both human and technical, as well as endogenous and exogenous. In consequence the ever increasing scope of digital tools, which allow for the organization of information in order to understand the transformations of an archaeological site, transforms the organizations that generate or manage these data. The transformations induced by digital methods are carriers of an antagonism between continuity and discontinuity, which leads to constant reorganization. At the same time online collaboration and design (centered on and with the user) allow for open access to data, to code and to make the design process accessible to the greatest number. In this spirit, archaeology seeks interoperability and reusability (e.g. FAIR principles, LOUD data), which in return, leads to the emergence of new organizations of information, as for example, the definition of criteria for interoperability, data models dedicated to data exchange (e.g. CIDOC CRM), dissemination platforms, the scripting of treatments in order to make these reproducible, or the sharing of terminologies. Hereby interoperability takes on a dual sense: An “internal interoperability”, encompassing the current process of retrieving data as it is stored in the primary recording system of the excavation and their transformation for their traditional publication or storage in digital repositories, and an “external interoperability”, encompassing the effort of linking these "final" data with already existing data in order to facilitate exploitation by any kind of future research. In this contribution we present an approach to study the emergence of the relationship between the organization of information and the transformation of the organization. The study is conducted in view of the SIAMOIS project (“Mutualized and Open Archaeological Information System based on Semantic Intelligence”) which has the objective to master these relationships in a collaborative context.</p>
<p>In order to analyze these transformations, we propose a conceptualized analysis model, formalized in the T!O (Transformation, Information, Organization) framework. This framework takes seriously the principle of “Tertium non datur” in classical logic by using a relational approach. In this way the differences expressed within the conventional binary logic are not understood as conflicting opposites, but as a source for a dynamic equilibrium where the actualization of one state is simultaneous with the potentialization of the other. Thereby a formalized representation of the organization of an archaeological community is produced and the processes constituting the generation of knowledge are brought into view and can become the object of particular attention.</p>
<p>As a use case, the paper analyzes the production of archaeological knowledge by modeling excavation processes and the establishment of discourse based on typologies which are employed in publications, in order to show how the T!O framework allows for reflecting on institutional processes at the same time as it indicates the necessary parameters to organize and record archaeological data. Modeling these processes brings “silences” in the archeological data to the fore, which are either generally left unconsidered as implicit knowledge, or at least problematized when the attempt is made to transform the same knowledge by way of ontologies. Our approach shows that only magnifying the individual processes of knowledge production in a research project ultimately allows for those “shared conceptualizations” that are sought when aligning AIS and ontologies under the objective of publishing archaeological data.</p>
archaeological information system, interoperability, knowledge production, organizational modeling, ontology, thesaurus
Computational archaeology, Europe, Protohistory, Theoretical archaeology
