Linked Open Data Vocabularies and Recognising Intellectual Contributions via Orcid: The Example of kerameikos.org

Abstract

Recent statements issued by the two most prominent archaeology membership organisations in the United States (AIA and SAA) encourage that departments, colleges and universities should evolve their positions on the recognition of the intellectual effort involved in digital research and publication. Given that computation methodologies in scholarship and dissemination are increasingly mainstream in archaeology as a whole, these types of academic labour should no longer be seen as niche areas. Digital tools are inseparable from analogue ones in cataloguing and analysing information, as well as publishing new knowledge of relevance across the humanities and to all types of archaeology. In order to remain apace of these changes, it is incumbent upon digital publishers to alter their workflows so that the scholarly profile of an academic author can be populated, allowing each contributor to be acknowledged for their unique contribution. Kerameikos.org, a collaborative international project aiming to define the intellectual concepts of ancient Greek pottery in accordance with the principles of Linked Open Data (LOD), has recently made progress in this area by formalising contributions to the project through current standards for scholarly communication. In this paper, we demonstrate how the intellectual effort of each project contributor, several of whom were students, is being credited using a scholarly profile in Open Researcher and Contributor ID – or ORCID (https://orcid.org/). After introducing ORCID and its adoption by Kerameikos.org, and then summarising the project participants and workflow, the paper concludes with a brief section on lessons learned as a result of these efforts.