A range of example scenarios were investigated in order to help evaluate the functionality, usefulness and interoperability of the Demonstrator. For these, the Demonstrator was set with an arbitrary limit of 100 results. This was primarily to deal with situations where a very general query might return a large number of results and take an excessively long time. The 100 result limit should probably be increased for operational use. While the current server and user interface are intended for demonstration rather than operational use, section 4.4 discusses performance issues with the SPARQL platform and further work for operational implementation.
As discussed in section 4.1, the degree of overlap in the datasets places some constraints upon the type of queries it makes sense to pursue. This article discusses a number of different search scenarios, based on a selection of topics derived from an Internet Archaeology publication reporting on a Roman townhouse from the same LEAP Silchester excavation database that forms one of the STAR datasets (Clarke et al. 2007). Inevitably, the scenarios are somewhat artificial, intended to illustrate the capabilities of the Demonstrator and uncover topics for discussion. However, the intention of rooting the scenarios in a published article is to support the validity and potential relevance of the outcomes. The scenarios verify that the topics can be located in the LEAP STAR dataset and investigate whether related information can be found in the other STAR datasets or the OASIS grey literature via cross search.
The STAR Demonstrator can be accessed online. The scenarios discussed below resulted from searches carried out between January and March 2011. In the following discussion, queries to the Demonstrator are represented in the concise format shown in the illustrative examples immediately following.
Context Type = hearth > Contains ContextFind = Coin
In the Demonstrator this corresponds to
As query concepts are entered into the type fields, automatic suggestions of controlled types are displayed for the user to select. These are taken from the relevant thesaurus (except for Samples where no vocabulary was available). Here we see possible Finds concepts suggested from the Archaeological Object Thesaurus:
Results are represented (for this query) as
Returned = 3 results: 2 OASIS, 1 LEAP
or to illustrate with results from another query
Returned = 100+ results: 25 LEAP , 44 OASIS, 30 RRAD, 100+ MoLA ROP
Where 100+ results have been returned, for this analysis the query has (usually) been run on the different datasets individually, owing to the 100 result limit.
Scenarios: Hearths | Evidence for metalworking associated with hearths | Evidence for furnaces associated with hearths | Mosaic/tessellated floors | Wells | Finds and samples from wells | Stratigraphic search examples
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| File last updated: Mon July 18 2011