IASSIST: ARIADNE – building a global infrastructure

Published: 2022-05-19

Logo IASSIST Conference 2022On 7–10 June, the IASSIST 2022 conference takes place in Gothenburg, with SND as their host organization. The theme for this year’s conference is “Data by Design – Building a Sustainable Data Culture”. Several members of the SND staff will be present at the conference. In the weeks leading up to the conference, we will present some of the sessions with SND staff.

 


 

Johan Fihn Marberg, head of IT at SND, will hold a session on 10 June with the title ARIADNE portal: Building a common resource infrastructure for archaeologists worldwide”.

Photo of Johan Fihn MarbergTell us a little about your presentation at the IASSIST conference

I’ll talk about how we’ve managed to squeeze in archaeological resources such as research data and so-called grey literature from 40 stakeholders in the common ARIADNE portal. The project has required a lot of manual work to harmonize and enrich metadata from the various organizations for the metadata model we’ve created for the portal, especially for the smaller organizations, which have less technical capability to do the work.

As a topic, ARIADNE may be a bit of an odd figure at a conference about information science from a social science perspective. But there’s plenty of general knowledge to be learned for anyone who wants to create a research data catalogue that’s rich in metadata and has a good search function.

Why is it important to share and discuss this with other people?

I think it’s an important experience to share how you can harmonize such a variation of resources into a well-functioning system with a product that’s as good as the portal has now become.

This project also concerns a topic where everyone really wants to create something together, where everyone can see the benefit of what they’re doing. Many of them are dedicated people who’ve been cooperating in research for many years. In ARIADNE, they see new opportunities for research, where you can make comparisons that you haven’t been able to make before.

What are you looking forward to at the IASSIST conference and what do you hope to take away from it?

I look forward to seeing international colleagues again, who I haven’t seen for years. It’s always interesting to get inspiration from others and to see how their operations develop. My first IASSIST was in 2006 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This will be my tenth conference.