English Heritage (EH) Intrasis Archiving and Linked Data (IALD) project is exploring the methodologies and best practice for creation of full digital archives from Intrasis and other related systems used in excavation and analysis, along with the generation of associated Linked Data for deposition with the Archaeology Data Service (ADS).

This paper presents work that has gone into preparing various datasets as Linked (Open) Data, and will consider whether different circumstances of that creation and utilisation require the use or not of the ()s around L(O)D. This will include discussion of issues relating to database structures and content and the integration of controlled vocabulary terminologies using the RDF/XML based SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System) W3C standard. It will consider the intellectual work necessary for mapping from database structures developed in Intrasis to the Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM and CRM-EH), and how this is aided by tools developed by the related research work of the STAR/STELLAR projects (http://hypermedia.research.glam.ac.uk/kos/stellar/).

While it is widely acknowledged that the positive benefits of making data openly available online, wider access; facilitating re-use; promoting knowledge transfer, greatly outweigh the negatives, that does not mean that we can ignore the negative issues. There are reasons why bodies and organisations have been established to ‘curate’ certain information and most archaeologists would acknowledge that it is not necessarily a good idea to simply publish the precise location details of Hoards or other archaeological sites with valuable finds (whether of great financial or intellectual value), because of the very real risks of heritage crime.

So there may be viable reasons why it is not a universal good to simply ‘open everything up’ in the same way. There exists already some good practice from custodians in deciding how to go about doing so. To some extent that is why we already have Intellectual Property Rights, but IPR also serves to protect the rights of individuals in circumstances where a slogan of ‘open data for all’ might not be ideal. In academic circles in particular we do not generally condone merely plagiarising another person’s data or literary text and publishing it without due acknowledgement, let alone attempting to make commercial advantage from doing so - perhaps the nearest academic equivalent to nighthawking an archaeological site? Academic attribution and data citation may also be crucially important for elements of trust and provenance, and also for maintaining research threads that enable researchers to follow research threads through links to other information.

The paper will also consider the potential to join up new data with legacy data (Intrasis based techniques are equally applicable to all previous EH databases in MS-Access and other systems), along with data generated by other related historic environment domains (e.g. Architectural Survey, Aerial Survey, Maritime and Remote Sensing data).