Digital Data Curation Through Semantic Encoding: An operational proposal for the journey of archaeological data

Digital curation in cultural heritage organisations has become more and more established as empirical research for tools, techniques, skills, and standards for making curators able to manage the related digital data. It supports specific applications in diverse contexts of cultural heritage management. This thesis addresses the archaeological domain, a particular challenge since projects span from the planning of the excavations to the analysis of the findings, their interpretation, and the display of the results in a final exhibition. Further, in archaeology, digital curation must account for the relationship between physical materials and their digital twins. Our approach formulates a comprehensive definition of digital curation for the archaeological domain and devises a unified model based on the semantic organisation of the data. The methodology that is employed in this study is to i) abstract a general model for digital curation from the analysis of cultural heritage domains with a particular focus on archaeology ii) validate the model on some case studies in the archaeological field, and iii) apply the model to an archaeological project, with a preliminary evaluation of the approach and the suggestions of about the merge of the semantic encoding of archaeological data with a transdisciplinary approach.