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 we organize and extract useful information, such as relationships and connections, from hundreds of archaeological datings? This is the problem addressed by ArKG: an interdisciplinary project that brings together researchers from the School of Anthropology, the Institute of Physics, the Department of Computer Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and researchers from Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data IMFD). ArKG seeks to organize, systematize, visualize, and openly distribute Chile's archaeological dating using the Millennium DB graph database engine, created at the IMFD.

This project was recently presented at the V Workshop on Archaeology and Isotopes in Southern South America, a meeting 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 adequately protected, organized, or made available to researchers and the general public. Therefore, the objective of ArKG is to create a system that overcomes these problems and is useful to Chilean archaeology, and we hope that it will also have a wider reach, " says Roberto Campbell, an academic at the School of Anthropology at the Catholic University of Chile. "In addition to taking advantage of the technology developed by the IMFD, such as MilleniumDB, this project allows us to give the data a structure that is flexible and useful for future use," explains Cristián Riveros, an academic at the Department of Computer Science at the Catholic University of Chile and a researcher at the IMFD.

We can think of archaeology as a library with thousands of paper cards (the dates) 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. At ArKG, we have chosen to organize the data in an RDF knowledge graph, which is a global standard of the WWW, and which anyone can read with their computer and connect to other data on the web," Riveros points out. "In fact, ArKG connects the dated data with other knowledge graphs on the web, such as the Wikidata graph."

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

For Campbell, "the graph system proves to be flexible, stable, and capable of storing and presenting information in a non-linear way. In this sense, it is feasible to create more complex searches, including more variables at once in a coherent way. These are virtues that allow us to think about data in new ways and arrive at reflections and conclusions that we might not otherwise have seen."

For Campbell, using this system "has been and continues to be a constant challenge, as we are facing a new way of organizing information, different from the more traditional way that has been done, at least in archaeology. For this reason, the interest and patience of computer science researchers have been key. We hope that this will be the beginning of greater collaboration between our disciplines, in line with the growing importance of multidisciplinary work . Along with this, it is also important to train people in the social sciences to be open to these new tools, as the solution to many of our problems with information management seems to lead us irrevocably to computational methods," the researcher points out.

The relevance of this work lies in the understanding that dating information, as well as other bodies of data that are 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, created entirely in Chile at the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data, which has the capacity to handle large amounts of data and establish connections and links in a non-tabular manner.

This allows its implementation in ArKG to facilitate the management of complex data, providing long-term traceability and addressing the need to improve data 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 serve to 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 academic Roberto Campbell, also from the School of Anthropology. You can find more information about ArKG at: https://arkg.cl/