Franco Niccolucci

Franco Niccolucci is the coordinator of the EU infrastructure projects ARIADNE, on digital archaeology, and PARTHENOS, a cluster of infrastructures on digital humanities, language studies, heritage science and archaeology. A former professor at the University of Florence, he has directed STARC (Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center) in Nicosia, Cyprus, from 2008 to 2013 and then he moved back to PIN, a research agency of the University of Florence, where he is the current directory of VAST-LAB, the department in charge of digital applications to cultural heritage. His research interests focus on knowledge organization in cultural heritage and as such he has published a number of papers and has recently edited two special issues of international journals on this subject.

When: Day 1 - 14th November, Session 4: Research Data Management in practice #Part 1, 14:15 - 15:15

Cultural Heritage: when data are much worst than one can believe

Abstract. The presentation will deal with the issue of managing cultural heritage data and will be based on the experience of European Research Infrastructures in which the author is the coordinator.

The first one presented, PARTHENOS, is a cluster of Research Infrastructures in the sector of digital humanities and cultural heritage, in charge of defining common data strategies and policies. Work on guidelines for the DMP is in progress, currently collecting the recommendations adopted, when existing, by the participating infrastructures, which span from digital humanities to language studies, cultural heritage and archaeology.

The second one, ARIADNE, deals with archaeological data. It has achieved some good results concerning the findability, access and interoperability of archaeological data. Re-using them is mainly a matter of educating researchers to trust and use other researchers’ data: it depends on a methodology typical of the discipline, where other people’s conclusions are generally used, and not their data. However, preparing and making “good” data available is a necessary, but not sufficient, pre-condition to advocate for a change in the archaeologists’ approach. ARIADNE is not going to produce a formal recommendation, but the analysis of current practices and needs, and the experience made in the project about offering archaeological data access allows outlining some emerging issues and possible solutions.