Archaeological Records of Europe - Networked Access

Organising Research Projects, Projects to Raise the Public's Awareness and to Teach and Disseminate Knowledge.

This ARENA activity draws on several standards initiatives, mark-up languages and protocols that have emerged in recent years, the Dublin core standard, XML and Z39.50 in particular. The ARENA partners have different expertise and experience in these standards, languages and protocols, this activity will allow all partners to benefit from such skills and expertise. This pooled expertise will be used to implement ARENA activities two and three.

This activity also enables interoperable access to distributed archives from the ARENA: European Archaeological Archives and Heritage web portal. It is important to stress that this is not another gateway to web sites, such as ARGE (the Archaeological Resource Guide to Europe). Gateways such as ARGE rely on a centrally held database of web sites, which must be updated to maintain currency. The Z39.50 portal will link to distributed target databases which can be updated by their host institutions.

Activity Objectives

• To agree metadata standards for the description of cultural archives.
• To investigate the use of multilingual thesauri in cross-searching.
• To implement high level interoperability using http protocols and SGML/XML amongst all partners.
• To create a framework for a European Archaeological archives web-based portal.

The content of this project does not necessarily reflect the position of the European Community, nor does it involve any responsibility on the part of the European Community.

© ADS 1996-2005 Edited by Jon Kenny, email Monday, 08 August 2005 Cite only: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/arena/arenaactivity4.html for this page