Paris. With the rise of preventive archeology in the past twenty years, it is a real mountain of data that has been produced by Archaeologists of INRAP. For the National Institute for Research in this area, one of the main challenges is to transform this dormant production into an object of study for researchers. The “archipelago” platform, launched at the beginning of March, allows you to open the doors of the inrap archives thanks to a digital portal.
Excavation reports during diagnostic operations, articles, scientific communications produced by INRAP agents and current research projects are now listed on archipelago whose search engine allows you to quickly filter the thousands of documents. A real invitation launched to researchers, as Marc Bouiron, scientific and technical director of INRAP explains: “The objective is to facilitate access to this data for the entire archaeological community, whether our agents, researchers or students. »»
This new tool represents an important investment for INRAP (€ 1.3 million, including € 950,000 in grants from the fund for public transformation). Because this approach is part of the national effort in terms of “open data”, that is to say the provision of data produced by public organizations. Archipel meets this objective of the French administration with those of “open science”, a vast scientific movement advocating transparency and dissemination of scientific data, considered as a common good.
To build the platform, INRAP technical service providers relied on the databases provided by the institute’s documentalists, in particular the “Dolia” catalog which centralizes the documentary funds produced by the agents. Archipelago is coupled with the “HAL” platform, a benchmark for open science in France, to give access to scientific publications of INRAP agents. “The mass of data is really important, it relates to 50,000 operations, explains Marc Bouiron. To make these data accessible, we needed scientific quality, but also an ease of use in order to allow researchers to appropriate the tool. »»
A cartographic tool
Aimed in the first place for researchers, Archipel is also a tool for inrap archaeologists, who find there a directory of their colleagues accompanied by a register of all the operations in which they participated: “It is also an internal tool, for a supervisor who is looking for a specialist in a subject for example”specifies the scientific director. The general public is also invited to appropriate the site, in particular through the cartographic tool to visualize a few thousand operations in mainland France and overseas.
