FISH Archaeological Sciences Thesaurus

"Used for recording the techniques, recovery methods and materials associated with the archaeological sciences. English Heritage takes a leading role in setting standards for recording the built and buried heritage. By setting standards that can be adopted by everyone, we can make sure that all records are consistent. In other words, if everyone uses the same words to describe the same monument, archaeological object, building material, etc, then anyone using this common language can easily index, retrieve and understand these records. With this aim in mind, English Heritage is continually developing new thesauri to provide structure and guidelines for the standardisation of terms to be used when creating new records of the past. Now, in our drive to disseminate these standards and promote their wider use, we are making available seven separate online thesauri. A tailor-made suite of programs has been developed, which uses a database to create a series of web pages for any chosen thesaurus. These can be easily accessed using a frames-capable browser and regularly updated as new terms are submitted and approved by our Data Standards Unit.

National cultural heritage thesauri and vocabularies have acted as standards for use by both national organizations and local authority Historic Environment Records but until now have lacked the persistent Linked Open Data (LOD) URIs that would allow them to act as vocabulary hubs for the Web of Data. The AHRC funded SENESCHAL project aims to make such vocabularies available online as Semantic Web resources. SENESCHAL will start with major vocabularies as exemplars and project partners will continue to make other vocabularies available. Other organizations are welcome to make use of the data and services which will be open licensed.

RESTful web services will be developed for the project to make the vocabulary resources programmatically accessible and searchable. These will include the provision to ‘feed back’ new terms (concepts) suggested by users."