Toward a Novel Application of CIDOC CRM to Underwater Archaeological Surveys

The VENUS European project aims at providing scientific methodologies and technological tools for the virtual exploration of deep water archaeological sites. Due to the peculiarities of underwater archaeological surveys, the knowledge about the studied items is both provided by underwater archaeology and photogrammetry measures. The preservation and archival of this knowledge corresponds to one of the most important issues of this project. In order to efficiently handle these operations and to support sound and complete reasoning procedures an appropriate formal representation of underwater surveys is required. The exploration of artificial intelligence methods and tools motivated us to adopt an ontology-based solution. This paper presents our application ontology which takes into account a task ontology involving photogrammetry and an underwater archaeological domain ontology. For interoperability reasons, we then propose a mapping of this ontology on to the ISO International Standard CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model.