ArKG: Graphs at the Service of Archaeology

The interdisciplinary project was recently presented at the 5th Workshop on Archaeology and Isotopes in Southern South America

How can useful information, such as relationships and connections, be organized and extracted from hundreds of archaeological datings? This is the problem addressed by ArKG: the interdisciplinary project that brings together researchers from the School of Anthropology, the Institute of Physics, the Department of Computer Science at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and researchers from the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD). ArKG aims to organize, systematize, visualize, and openly distribute archaeological datings from Chile using the graph database engine MillenniumDB, created at IMFD.

This project was recently presented at the 5th Workshop on Archaeology and Isotopes in Southern South America, a gathering of researchers studying stable isotopes applied to archaeology in the Southern Cone, held in Coyhaique.

“Radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating (both dating techniques used in archaeology) are a fundamental element of the knowledge that archaeology generates about past societies. Despite this, this information is not properly safeguarded, organized, and available to researchers and the general public. Therefore, ArKG’s goal is to create a system that overcomes these problems and is useful to Chilean archaeology, and we hope it will have a broader reach as well”, says Roberto Campbell, faculty member at the School of Anthropology of Universidad Católica de Chile. “In addition to leveraging the technology developed by IMFD, such as MillenniumDB, this project allows us to give data a structure that is flexible and useful for future use”, explains Cristián Riveros, faculty member at the Department of Computer Science of Universidad Católica de Chile and IMFD researcher.

We can think of archaeology as a library with thousands of paper index cards (the datings) scattered across many different boxes: finding a specific relationship between cards was like looking for a needle in a haystack. “Before ArKG, dating data in Chile was scattered across papers, Excel spreadsheets, or files. In ArKG, we chose to organize the data into an RDF knowledge graph, a global WWW standard that anyone can read with their computer and connect with other web data”, highlights Riveros. “In fact, ArKG connects dating data with other knowledge graphs on the web, such as the Wikidata graph”.

The knowledge graph engine MillenniumDB, created at the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data, can support and be configured as a tool that meets the needs of researchers in this area of the social sciences. MillenniumDB makes it possible to create an interconnected knowledge map, making research faster and more in-depth for all users.

For Campbell, “the graph system proves to be a flexible, stable system that allows information to be stored and presented in a non-linear way. In that sense, it is feasible to create more complex queries, including several variables at once in a coherent way. These are strengths that allow us to think about data in new ways and arrive at reflections and conclusions that we might not otherwise have seen”.

Using this system, for Campbell, “has been and continues to be a constant challenge, since we are facing a new way of organizing information, different from the more traditional way it has been done, at least in archaeology. For that very reason, the interest and patience of the Computer Science researchers have been key. We hope this will be the beginning of greater collaboration between our disciplines, along the lines of giving more importance to multidisciplinary work. Along with this, it is also important to train Social Sciences professionals who are open to these new tools, since the solution to many of our information management problems seems to inevitably lead us toward computing”, notes the researcher.

The relevance of this work lies in understanding that dating information, like other bodies of data fundamental to understanding humanity’s past on a large scale, has a methodological origin in the physical sciences. Furthermore, the acquisition and organization of this data is strongly determined by digital computing methods. For this reason, ArKG addresses the need for inter- and transdisciplinary research dedicated to the multimodal and multifocal understanding of dating.

Open and local system

MillenniumDB is an open-source graph database system, developed entirely in Chile at the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data, capable of handling large amounts of data and establishing connections and links in a non-tabular way.

This means that its implementation in ArKG facilitates the management of complex data, providing long-term traceability and addressing the need to improve dating reporting standards in the literature, complying with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). “We also hope that the scenarios and needs we present to those professionals (in Computer Science) will help improve the tools they design, making them more capable of addressing different case studies”, adds Campbell.

At the 5th Workshop on Archaeology and Isotopes in Southern South America, presentations were given by students Matías Maldonado, from the Institute of Physics; José Mendoza, from the Department of Computer Science; Matías Bravo, from the School of Anthropology; and faculty member Roberto Campbell, also from the School of Anthropology. You can find more information about ArKG at: https://arkg.cl/