Questioning Data Standards in Zooarchaeology

Summary

The scholarly community is giving data increasing attention in recent years, and solutions for data management are emerging. However, seeing data management primarily as a matter of compliance means that we face continued data loss, as many datasets enter repositories without adequate description to enable their reuse. Furthermore, because many researchers have little experience reuse of public data, they lack understanding and incentives to consider changes in their own research practices to facilitate future reuse. Improving data reuse raises the issue of data standards. While many researchers employ standards for simplifying comparisons across datasets, they are constrained by the fact that standards reflect research goals and agendas that are not necessarily universally shared. This paper discusses Linked Open Data (LOD) as an approach to improving data description, intelligibility and discoverability to facilitate reuse. I present examples of how annotating zooarchaeology datasets with LOD can facilitate data integration without forcing standardization. I conclude by recognizing that data sharing is not without its challenges. However, the research community’s careful attention and recognition of datasets as valuable scholarly outputs will go a long way to ensuring that the products of our work are much more widely useful.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• New Methods in Zooarchaeology

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