Aggregation and Characterisation

Context

The aggregation and characterisation activity has identified what marine data collections are available and defined the core information about them.

We have developed a shared and cross-searchable online catalogue of marine data across the UK. This catalogue is now freely and openly available via the Unpath’d Waters Portal. The Portal includes the same information displayed in existing online search systems, without duplicating it, including the core features:

• The maritime resources held by the Archaeology Data Service
• The maritime resources held within the national records of each of the UK nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
• A shop window for UK marine data in European heritage portals, such as ARIADNE

The Unpath’d Waters Portal allows users to search by subject terms, using a map-based spatial search or using a timeline.

Aim

The UK Marine Area extends over some 867,400 km2, equivalent to 3.5 times the terrestrial land surface. The marine and maritime heritage of this vast area is exceptional and diverse. It encompasses submerged prehistoric landscapes, inundated monuments and settlements, wrecks and aircraft losses, maritime industrial and military complexes, coastal and intertidal archaeology, seaside resorts, ports and dockyards. The public already engages with this heritage and there’s huge potential to address key research themes.

The collections that record, locate, characterise and represent this variety are remarkable. They are physical, digital, textual, graphical, artefactual, environmental, spatial and oral. But these collections are split between government organisations, commercial concerns, academic institutions, charitable foundations and trusts, museums, archives, and individual collectors.

They are also in a fragile digital state and lack shared metadata standards. This means it is impossible for collections to easily share digital information with each other. This means the data associated with them is far from FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).

This activity has improved and brought together the digital components of the UK’s marine heritage collections. We have reviewed the demands and capabilities of existing digital infrastructures and enabled researchers and the public to access the UK marine collections via human and machine-readable interfaces.

To achieve this, we have used approaches successfully developed by the ARIADNE Research Infrastructure, which provides an online search interface for national heritage inventories for more than 20 countries.

Each country uses different words to classify sites and monuments, and even period terms, such as Iron Age or Viking Age, have different definitions. We therefore have to map these to agreed shared standards to allow researchers to pose questions that cross over modern political boundaries.

The problem faced by Unpath’d Waters is a microcosm of this. Even within the UK different words are used to describe the same types of ship, and the Iron Age and Viking Age in Scotland do not have the same start and end dates as that in England.

Given the huge range of maritime heritage records, these are identical issues to those faced in creating a UK national collection that encompasses all subject areas. The work of this activity in Unpath’d Waters will therefore provide lessons for the Towards a National Collection research programme more broadly.

Outputs

To bring together a wide range of disparate resources, each with their own data standards, we mapped all data schemas to an implementation of a high-level ontology developed over the last decade by the ARIADNE RI, the AO-Cat, itself a subset of the ISO standard CIDOC-CRM. Period terms were mapped using the Perio.Do web service, and we published new period definitions for Scottish and Irish data sets.

The Unpath’d Waters Portal includes over 100,000 maritime resources from Historic England, Historic Environment Scotland, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, Manx National Heritage, the Archaeology Data Service, the Department for Communities Northern Ireland, Museum of London Archaeology, Wessex Archaeology, the Nautical Archaeology Society, Coracle Archaeology Ltd., Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology, and Maritime Archaeology Ltd., the Bangor University iMarDIS data system, and the Mary Rose Trust.

Two videos demonstrating the Portal were created by ADS with support from Tom Dawson (St Andrews University). The videos were featured on the Discovery Bus, and also at the TaNC conference in November 2024.

In addition, an updated version of the ADS Guide to Good Practice for Marine Survey was created in collaboration with Bangor University, and published in late 2024.

Activity collaborators

• Historic England
• Historic Environment Scotland
• Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales
• Department for Communities, Northern Ireland
• Manx Heritage
• Museum of London Archaeology
• Wessex Archaeology
• Mary Rose Trust
• Lloyd’s Register Foundation
• MEDIN: The Marine Environment Data Information Network