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This paper describes the activities carried out under the ARIADNE project to demonstrate the item-level integration process of archaeological archives through the use of semantic technologies. To this end, some ancient coin records, coming from the archives of important European archaeological institutions, were selected. The subset thus created, has been carefully analysed by means of specific tools to identify similar concepts and common metadata elements that could serve as the basis for integration. CIDOC CRM was chosen as the conceptual model for encoding the identified entities, while some important numismatic vocabularies have been employed to improve standardisation. The implementation phase has benefited from the use of advanced tools for mapping and conversion of the original information in a semantic form (RDF), the creation of a triple store to place the newly integrated data and the necessary interfaces for accessing and querying them.

One of the emerging needs of the archaeological community is represented by the importance of availing of systems that allow to tackle new research questions, by querying diverse available resources. Usually, archaeological digital data is stored in non-standardised individual databases with a limited possibility of integration and a high level of fragmentation. The EU-funded project ARIADNE, has developed an e-infrastructure which enables the integration of archaeological datasets from various different institutions, integrating resource discovery metadata using controlled vocabularies, thesauri, gazetteers and ontology (CIDOC CRM). This paper presents the ARIADNE infrastructure, describing the activities undertaken by the project to achieve interoperability of archaeological resources at the dataset and item level. Moreover, the architecture of the ARIADNE Infrastructure and the Portal, with the different ways to search and access the resources are described.