The European Union has granted 6.5 million euro to the data infrastructure project ARIADNE. 187.425 euro goes to SND, which is one of 24 partners in the project.
ARIADNE (Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Datasets Networking in Europe) aims to bring together existing research data infrastructures so that researchers from different countries can use European archaeological digital data sets across borders. There is now a large availability of archaeological digital datasets that altogether span different periods, domains and regions. Unfortunately, these data form a vast and fragmented corpus and their potential is constrained by difficult access and non-homogenous perspectives. ARIADNE and the integrating activities of the project will enable trans-national access of researchers to data centres, tools and guidance, and the creation of new Web-based services based on common interfaces to data repositories, availability of reference datasets and usage of innovative technologies.
The project will start in January 2013 and last for four years. SND is involved in six of 17 work packages. Among the tasks that SND will work on is the identification of existing data standards and metadata, and the needs of the researchers in the field. SND will also work with harmonization of the data sets to be included in the infrastructure and the implementation of the tools and data services that are necessary for increased European integration of data. An important test material in SND's work in ARIADNE is the GIS data that are already available via SND.