Today's boundaries often cut through culturally homogenous landscapes of the past. That’s why archaeological research cannot stop at state borders and also heritage protection benefits from cross border views. Because every state of Germany is culturally independent, we find a very differentiated situation of data models for archaeological information. So the exchange of archaeological information within Germany and externally is not easy at all. These problems strengthen dealing with protected sites.

Authorities of archaeological heritage protection are more and more required to open their data to the public. Initiatives like INSPIRE and GDI-DE aim at improved and smooth information exchange. Therefore the commission “Archaeology and Information Systems” of the Association of State Archaeologists in Germany is concerned with conceptual, technical, economical and legal problems, it is a platform to exchange knowledge and experiences. Special teams work on recommendations to harmonise and standardise archaeological data models, on solutions to archive digital archaeological data and on legal aspects of geodata.

The development of the Archaeological Data eXport standard (ADeX) was initiated by the commission “Archaeology and Information Systems” and was implemented by its modelling team. The aim is to develop a simple standard for exchanging archaeological data between all relevant institutions throughout Germany and to support the export of archaeological data to third parties, for example to INSPIRE.

As result of extensive analysis of data structures used in various archaeological institutions, a core set of attributes describing archaeological areas was chosen and integrated into ADeX. Based on this, the current work is to define attributes describing (legally) protected sites. This new version of ADeX may be compatible with INSPIRE and with recommendations of the Association of State Archaeologists ("Opinions on Archaeological Heritage Protection and INSPIRE Protected Sites").

The presentation describes the current standard ADeX 2.0 with its possible extensions for protected sites and INSPIRE.

(Poster)