Balancing FAIR and CARE Principles in Linking the Kuden Petrographic Database with Linked Open Data Sources

Kristine Hardy* and Mathieu Leclerc

Databases and archives provide reference values (or media such as images) that can help users identify their samples or gain additional information about them. They can also generate new hypothesis by collating different types of information or data from multiple places or times. Key concepts of Linked Open Data (LOD) are the use of controlled vocabularies, and the data being freely accessible and reusable. Providing data as LOD fits the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) principles and can help make archaeological findings available to the descendants of the communities they are derived from. However, the Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility and Ethics (CARE) principles for Indigenous data governance emphasis the need for communities to have control over data derived from them, and this can be challenging for databases with large spatial coverages to implement. Kuden is a petrographic database, largely based on William Dickinson’s reports on the ceramic fabrics of Pacific pottery. It describes the mineral and lithic abundances for different ceramic fabrics, and links to high-definition images, with many full slide scans. The online database and image archive is currently hosted by the Australian National University. This paper discusses the challenges in linking Kuden with other databases and gazetteers, such as GeoNames, PeriodO and WikiData. We investigate the benefits and issues with using WikiData as a way to present archaeological data to the worldwide community.