Warehousing Complex Archaeological Objects

Data organization is a difficult and essential component in cultural heritage applications. Over the years, a great amount of archaeological ceramic data have been created and processed by various methods and devices. Such ceramic data are stored in databases that concur to increase the amount of available information rapidly. However, such databases typically focus on one type of ceramic descriptors, e.g., qualitative textual descriptions, petrographic or chemical analysis results, and do not interoperate. Thus, research involving archaeological ceramics cannot easily take advantage of combining all these types of information. In this application paper, we introduce an evolution of the Ceramom database that includes text descriptors of archaeological features, chemical analysis results, and various images, including petrographic and fabric images. To illustrate what new analyses are permitted by such a database, we source it to a data warehouse and present a sample online analysis processing (OLAP) scenario to gain deep understanding of ceramic context.