From Rome, to Verona, to the Agro areas: Roundtrip. An experimentation of interoperability between SITAR, SITAVR and SITAIS

The collaboration between the SITAR and SITAVR projects, started in 2013, has continued thanks to a shared process of consolidation including: the conceptual model (GeoUML), the metadata, the documentation of the physical database and the publishing of data in XML format. The work also continued with a study on modelling and managing the time dimension in the context of archaeological databases and an experiment aiming to use the developed methodology and tools on a small town, Isola della Scala, in the province of Verona as part of the SITAIS project. Given the availability of three autonomous systems for three different territories linked by a single conceptual model, it was possible to test interoperability between the three implemented systems. The first experiment was developed by navigating an XML "complex" schema, where all the catalogued objects and associations between them were represented. A Web Feature Service was implemented for accessing data and a web application is currently being developed to allow users to query, navigate data and interrogate the three systems at once. A second experiment involved the generation of an XML "simplified" schema, where data are accessible on a single and flat form. Again, a Web Feature Service was implemented and a common GIS software was used to visualize the data provided by this service. The sharing of a conceptual model and vocabularies proved to be a winning approach for archaeological research and for the future interoperability between systems.