Open Data Metadata. The Importance of Archaeological Background

The MAPPA project set itself another highly innovative aim, quite revolutionary for Italian archaeology: lifting out of the archives the documents containing the data of archaeological investigations and making this information easily accessible to everyone and for any need: from research to protection, from urban planning to quality tourism, or even just for simple learned curiosity. This is how MOD (MAPPA Open Data archaeological archive) was conceived, the first Italian archive of open archaeological data, in keeping with European directives regarding easy access to Public Administration data, and to Research data. The MOD allows users to download the raw documentation and the grey literature of archaeological interventions. Originally conceived to collect the documentation of the excavations carried out in Pisa, the MOD considerably grew as the months went by. Also in consideration of the results of a survey promoted by the MAPPA project on «Open data and Italian archaeology», which showed how the need to share data is strongly felt by the majority of the archaeological community , the MOD, a little at a time, has become the open data archive of Italian archaeology, where archaeologists can publish excavation data, in fact entering archaeological documentation in the MOD is a publication to all effects, whose authorship is protected by a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) code and a CC BY or CC BY SA license. The first step was to create a 1 (Tim Bernard Lee) star archive and to transform it step by step to a 5 star repository. This year the MOD entered in the list of recommended repositories of the Journal of Open Archaeological Data. So the new step was to provide the MOD with a standardised management of the metadata referred to the single dataset, defining a minimum set of information so as to guarantee correct use of the data. Each archaeological intervention is associated with all the related data, from archaeographic documentation, the structure and format of the digital data, according to a schema that describes the history of the archaeological intervention, the sources used for creating the dataset, the method and the structure of the data and the physical data relations. The MOD Metadata schema is based on Dublin Core and the ISO 19115 schemas. A particular relevance in the schema is given to the description of the methodological background of the archaeological intervention: who direct the intervention, in which year, with what kind of method and so on. This part of the metadata schema is fundamental to translate to future generation of archaeologists the subjective part of the archaeological record, because only the comprehension of the methodological background permit a real semantic interoperability.