From Software to Living Data: Sustaining African Red Slip Ware Knowledge beyond the ARS3D project

Abstract

Digital archaeology projects frequently rely on bespoke software infrastructures that rapidly become obsolete once project funding ends. In contrast, well-curated and semantically structured data can mature over time, enabling sustained reuse, reinterpretation, and cross-domain integration. This contribution reflects on the African Red Slip Ware digital project ARS3D (Thiery et al., 2022; Thiery et al., 2023) through the guiding principle “software is like fish, data is like wine”, arguing for data-centric sustainability over software longevity. Within ARS3D, ARS objects were digitised in 3D and documented using a CIDOC CRM–based semantic data model. Rather than prioritising long-term maintenance of project-specific software, core research outputs were published directly as Linked Open Data (LOD) in RDF and archived on Zenodo, ensuring persistence, citability, and openness (Rokohl et al., 2021). This semantic foundation enabled subsequent analytical workflows, including semi-automatic feature comparison and iconographic reasoning (Thiery et al., 2023). In parallel, key entities such as objects, iconographic motifs, bibliographic references, and scholarly authorities were curated within Wikidata through dedicated WikiProjects, allowing these entities to “live on” as community-maintained knowledge (Thiery, 2024a, 2024b, 2022). A central step towards long-term interoperability is the integration of ARS3D data into the LADO ontology, via the domain-specific data hub archaeology.link (Thiery & Mees, 2024). Acting as a semantic mediation layer, archaeology.link enables ARS3D data to be interlinked with related resources such as NAVISone, where overlapping ARS objects, maritime iconography, and contextual thesauri already exist. Through shared ontologies and explicit mappings, independent datasets can be federated while retaining scholarly provenance. Looking ahead, this LADO-based integration provides a pathway for embedding ARS3D data into the NFDI4Objects Knowledge Graph and the Federated Knowledge Graph Ecosystem. The contribution demonstrates that in digital ceramic studies, sustainable data infrastructures outlast transient software.

References

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