HiGeoMes: Distributed Geodatabases in an archaeological joint research project

Abstract : The project 'HiGeoMes' seeks to connect knowledge about archaeological sites in the Near East with place names in ancient sources of the 2nd millennium BC. The paper describes the digital approach to integrate textual and geographical information by emphasizing the impact of interfaces linking diverse datasets. Several OGC-based Web services provide reviewed archaeological information in a Web GIS with query capabilities. Place-related philological data are stored in an OWL-store to model the topological relations of unidentified sites. An interface integrates a graph-viewer with the Web GIS by invoking both WFS- and REST-services to spatially integrate the datasets. Furthermore, a full integration on the semantic level and emerging potentials are discussed.