Automatic Metadata Generation in an Archaeological Digital Library: Semantic Annotation of Grey Literature

This paper discusses the automatic generation of rich metadata from excavation reports from the Archaeological Data Service library of grey literature (OASIS). The work is part of the STAR project, in collaboration with English Heritage. An extension of the CIDOC CRM ontology for the archaeological domain acts as a core ontology. Rich metadata is automatically extracted from grey literature, directed by the CRM, via a three phase process of semantic enrichment employing the GATE toolkit augmented with bespoke rules and knowledge resources. The paper demonstrates the potential of combining knowledge based resources (ontologies and thesauri) in information extraction, and techniques for delivering the automatically extracted metadata as XML annotations coupled with the grey literature reports and as RDF graphs decoupled from content. Examples from two consuming applications are discussed, the Andronikos web portal which serves the annotated XML files for visual inspection and the STAR project, research demonstrator which offers unified search across of archaeological excavation data and grey literature via the core ontology CRM-EH.