A Collaborative Knowledge Management System for Analyzing Non-verbal Markings in the Ancient Mediterranean World

This paper presents the results of an international archaeological project aiming to the study of non-verbal markings, named sigla, found on objects discovered in different excavation sites distributed in the Mediterranean area. The project is based on the involvement of an interdisciplinary team of experts from American and Italian universities and its aim is to develop a collaborative knowledge management system for formulating new hypotheses about the meanings, functions and roles of sigla stored in distributed archives. The paper analyzes knowledge integration problems and describes the design the environment supporting collaborative activities among archaeologists. For analysis purposes, the system integrates multimedia information retrieval strategies for recovering sigla according to certain conditions of similarity and taking into account other factors such as date, provenance and context. The conditions of similarity are based on possible recurrent patterns of sigla, connections and their layout merging from archaeologists’ descriptions or drawings of sigla.